Mystery Villa (2 page)

‘Oh, them,' said Conway, interested. ‘Oh, them's where I slipped on a bit of banana-skin some bloke had thrown away, and went right down on my hands and knees. The mercy of providence,' added Conway piously, ‘I wasn't worse hurt; and a fair scandal, if you ask me, the way them bananna-skins is throwed about. If I 'ad my way, that's what you Yard blokes would be looking after, instead o' persecuting poor hard-working chaps what only wants a chance to earn their living quiet and peaceful like.'

‘We know all about the honest, hard-working side of it,' retorted Bobby. ‘Any objection to turning your pockets out?'

‘As one gentleman to another,' answered Conway frankly, ‘none whatever, seeing as there's nothing in 'em.'

This statement at least proved to be true enough, for in fact they contained only a dirty handkerchief, an empty cigarette carton, an equally empty matchbox, some bits of string, and one solitary and somewhat battered penny.

‘O.K.,' commented Bobby. ‘Any objection now to telling me what you were in such a hurry about? Old Harry himself might have been after you. What was it all about?'

‘As one gentleman to another,' said Conway slowly, ‘it was just this – I was running to catch the train at Brush Hill station. And now,' he added reproachfully, ‘you've gone and been and made me lose it.'

‘How were you going to pay your fare?' Bobby asked.

‘Well, now, do you know, guv'nor,' declared Conway, with a great air of surprise, ‘I hadn't never thought of that – me being always used to my money in my pocket when I wanted it.'

‘Other people's money,, you mean,' retorted Bobby. ‘What made you so glad to see me, then?'

‘Why, that was just it, guv'nor. I just remembered like as I had no money to buy my ticket, and then there was you; and all in a flash I thought: “Why, there's Mr Owen, always generous, free-handed as the day. He'll lend me my fare all right, he will.” '

‘Confound your impudence,' Bobby exclaimed, half laughing in spite of himself. ‘Why not tell me what was really making you run like that?'

‘Guv'nor, I will,' declared Conway earnestly. ‘It was all along o' me not having only the one brown in my pocket, same as you saw, and not knowing where to get the price of a doss nowhere, and so I says to myself: “Con, my boy, run; run, my lad, that'll keep you warm anyways.” So I run, guv'nor; and then, guv'nor, you collared me.'

‘Cheese it,' Bobby exclaimed. ‘I suppose the fact is, you had been paying someone a visit, and got greeted with – with a cold bath, eh?'

This was a reference to a painful incident in Mr Conway's past career when, having been discovered by two stalwart undergraduates in a bedroom where he had no obvious business, he had been obliged to submit to a sound and thorough ducking in a cold-water tank before being kicked off the premises. The last part of the proceedings he had taken in good part, and glad to get off like that, but the ducking, he still felt, had been carrying the thing too far – he might easily have died of it, pneumonia or something, and where would his thoughtless assailants have been then? Why, he had swallowed pints of the stuff as they held him down in it with brooms, and altogether it was not an experience he cared to think about or be reminded of. His tone was more than a little reproachful as he answered:

‘Now, guv'nor, Mr Owen, sir. If it had been like that, wouldn't there be the whole lot of 'em piling after me, like, like' – he said pathetically – ‘a 'orde of 'ungry dawgs persooing of the 'unted fawn? Now, wouldn't there?'

That this observation was as true as it was picturesque, Bobby was obliged to admit to himself. And though he remained convinced it was something very strange indeed that had driven Conway on at such desperate speed, that had made even the meeting with one of his natural enemies, a C.I.D. man, a blessed relief, yet there was no means of making him tell. A quarrel with some colleague in roguery on whose preserve he had been trespassing, perhaps. An offer of a bribe might possibly be effective, but would be more likely to produce only some new impudent invention.

‘Cut along, then, if you won't tell the truth,' Bobby said. ‘Only, remember, I've seen you here, and, if any report comes in, it'll be all the worse for you. We shall know, whatever happened, you were in it – and had your own reasons for keeping quiet, and then we shall know what to think.'

‘Guv'nor,' declared Conway earnestly, ‘if you do, you'll do me wrong. If any job was worked round this part tonight, I wasn't in it. I won't deny I had a turn, but there won't be nothing said; because for why? There wasn't nothing done; and for that I'll take my dying oath, straight I will, guv'nor.'

There was a certain accent of sincerity in this that did impress Bobby. But he made no comment, and then, in a different tone, Conway said again:

‘Guv'nor.'

‘Well?'

‘Luck's been dead out with me, gov'nor, ever since I come out of the big house. There's times I almost wish as I was back. I ain't got no more nor that one brown you seed, guv'nor. It was the Waterloo Bridge hotel for me last night, and crool cold them arches is, and hard as you never would believe if you hadn't never tried, and as for luck – why, the night afore I did 'ave the price of a doss, and, if you'll believe me, that was the very night the Mad Millionaire, what the papers call him and no one's ever seen, had been along that way plastering every bench almost with his one-pound notes.'

‘Is that yarn really true?' Bobby asked, for he had heard before of how some unknown, mysterious individual no one had ever seen would, at long, irregular intervals, deposit on the Embankment benches sealed envelopes, containing each a one-pound or ten-shilling note, and marked on the outside of the envelope: ‘For the finder.'

A similar story told how a shower of such notes had once descended on the heads of a queue of unemployed and homeless waiting for admission to a casual ward, thrown to them by some person no one had seen. Another variety was a tale of how, once or twice, in East-end streets the residents had wakened in the morning to find that during the night pound or ten-shilling notes had been thrust through the letter-boxes – unexpected but welcome manna from heaven. Bobby had been a little sceptical of the truth of these stories, but Conway assured him they were accurate enough, though he himself, such was the weight of the malignant forces for ever pressing him down, had never had the luck to be the recipient of this mysterious bounty.

‘Some say it's a millionaire what's being sorry for all he's done in the past,' Conway explained. ‘And some think it's a parson of some kind, doing good according to his lights, what no man can't 'elp, but what I say is, if it was that way, he would be along quick enough to rake in the souls what he'd been laying down the bait for. But some says it's a sportsman what's brought off something good, wanting to share his luck so as he shan't lose it.'

‘It's a queer yarn,' Bobby observed. ‘What do you think yourself?'

‘It's a looney what' – began Conway, and then stopped so abruptly that Bobby had the idea he had intended to say more and then had changed his mind – ‘a looney what his keepers don't look after proper,' Conway completed his sentence, differently, as Bobby felt more certain still, from the manner first intended. ‘Guv'nor,' he added, ‘what about the price of a doss, guv'nor, so as in your own bed to-night you won't have to think of no poor bloke keeping them stones warm under Waterloo Bridge?'

Bobby sighed, and produced a couple of shillings, but, before handing them over, felt himself called upon – it must be remembered he was still quite young – to improve the occasion by a short but earnest homily on the advantages of hard work and honesty, and the extreme ruggedness of the path chosen by the transgressor. Conway listened with an air of meek yet absorbed attention that Bobby found distinctly pleasing, so that he really did not mind very much the loss of his two shillings as he handed them over.

‘That'll do you bed and breakfast,' he said. ‘Though I believe you men think we are at the Yard only for you to touch between one job and the next.'

‘Well, guv'nor,' observed Conway thoughtfully, as he accepted the two shillings, ‘if it wasn't for the likes of us, where would the likes of you be? Unemployed, that's what,' declared Conway darkly, as he melted away into the night, and not until he had vanished did Bobby discover that his smart, brand-new, gold-mounted, silk umbrella he had been so proud of had vanished, too.

At the same moment the long-threatening rain began to fall – heavily.

Though it did not keep Bobby awake, nor trouble his slumbers with vexing dreams – for he was still of an age that knows little of sleeplessness or vexing dreams – nevertheless the memory of that strange flight of Con Conway's through the silent and unheeding streets remained teasingly in his mind.

Something, it was certain, must have happened to drive the little man in such headlong panic, something so strange and terrifying it had actually come to him as a relief to find himself collared by a C.I.D. man. After he woke, before he got up, while he was dressing, Bobby worried himself with endless conjectures; while he was shaving he cut himself, because he was thinking about it instead of about what he was doing; so absorbed, indeed, was he that he actually forgot all about his second rasher of bacon, and allowed it to be taken away untasted – much to the alarm of his good landlady who, startled by so unprecedented an occurrence, was inclined to fear that he must be either ill or in love.

Later, Bobby made an excuse to ring up Brush Hill and inquire if any report of any unusual happening in the district had come in, explaining, as he did so, that he had seen Con Conway there the night before, and wondered if he had been up to mischief. The facetious reply came back that all was quiet on the Brush Hill front, but when, partly by chance, partly through a little manoeuvring on his own part, Bobby found himself, next afternoon, in the same district again, he took the opportunity of having a look round the scene of his odd encounter with Conway – perhaps not without a lingering hope that, with luck, he might run across Conway himself again, and so get that opportunity for which his soul yearned of a quiet little heart-to-heart chat with him about brand-new, gold-mounted, silk umbrellas.

He found Windsor Crescent easily enough, and strolled down it, and then by Osborne Terrace into Balmoral Grove. The houses all seemed much the same; large, roomy, comfortable but neglected-looking dwellings, generally detached or semi-detached, with good gardens, and nearly all with those basements that prove so conclusively by their very existence the truth of the theological doctrine of original sin and the natural perversity of man. The whole district appeared to have everywhere much the same shabby, neglected air, the same appearance of a prosperity that had passed and a poverty that had replaced it. A small proportion of the houses were vacant, many of the others showed those contrasting curtains at the different windows of the different floors that suggest occupation by different families of different tastes, and, indeed, there were a good many bills displayed proclaiming that there were to let flats described according to the fancy of agent or landlord as ‘self-contained', ‘convenient', ‘eligible', ‘desirable', ‘mansion', or ‘family'. Gardens and fences, too, had all the same neglected air, for this was, in fact, a neighbourhood that, fifty or sixty years ago, had been a favourite with well-to-do City men, but that since then the flow of the high tide towards the flat in Town, and the ebb of the low tide towards the villa on the Surrey Downs, had left desolate. For the tubes had passed it by, the trams knew it not, the motor-buses ignored it, and this lack of convenience of access to the City and the West-end had resulted generally in tenants to whom the consequently lower rent was of importance. Agents and landlords had found themselves finally driven to recommend it as ‘quiet' – desperate device indeed to suggest ‘quiet', as an inducement, to a generation that adores in equal measure jazz, the motor-cycle, and the loud-speaker, and that has invented the pneumatic drill.

It was with a distinctly puzzled air that Bobby perambulated this little decaying backwater of London life.

‘Now what on earth can Con Conway have been after round here?' he asked himself, as he hesitated whether to turn down Teck Gardens into Battenberg Prospect or to retrace his steps up Windsor Crescent, which, by the way, was no more a Crescent than Battenberg Prospect was a prospect or Balmoral Grove a grove – though probably their builder was a loyalist. ‘But I'll bet,' Bobby added to himself, ‘there must be something that brought Conway here – something he was after, just as something certainly happened that scared him like the devil.'

For Con Conway – no one knew for certain whether the ‘Con' represented his first name or was merely a pleasant allusion to the numerous occasions on which he had been a convict in one or other of His Majesty's gaols – was a man of some standing in his profession, and, as a self-respecting practitioner, was not likely to have been attracted save by the prospect of a job really worthy of his attention, such a job, and such loot, as in fact none of these ‘converted' residences seemed very likely to offer. Several of the empty houses would no doubt yield a visitor a certain amount of plunder in the shape of brass taps and lead piping and so on, but such vulgarities were not likely to tempt a man like Conway, who dealt only in jewels or cash. Indeed, so highly specialised a business is that of crime, so water-tight are its different compartments, that Conway would most likely have had no more idea than the average honest citizen how best to dispose of such stuff as brass taps and their like, though for a diamond ring or a gold brooch he would have known at once the best available market.