Mystery Villa (22 page)

Bobby's knock at the door was answered by an elderly woman, who, when he asked for Mr ‘Hutchings', showed him into the front sitting-room – a typical country-cottage parlour, with a big Bible and equally big family album on the round mahogany table in the centre of the room, various souvenirs of occasional holiday trips to London and Margate and elsewhere that one felt had been landmarks in a quiet, uneventful life, and on one wall an enlarged photograph of a young man in khaki, with, underneath, framed medals, and, also framed, the conventional official telegram of the war years.

Huddling together near the window, as if to give each other support, were Humphreys and his wife, who looked just such another as her husband, timid, faded, and bloodless, and as little likely to forsake the safe paths of respectability and convention. Impossible, Bobby felt at the first glance, to suspect them of murder, and yet it is true, as the old proverb says, that the heart of man is a dark forest, and who can tell to what wild, fierce extremity the relentless economic pressure of modern life may not drive any one of us? A rat in a corner will fight, they say. The ceaseless strain of struggling against the unknown, incomprehensible, impersonal forces of modern life – economic crises, war panics, threatened revolutions, changing traffic routes, the opening of a tube station here rather than there, the decision of the directors of some huge combine to begin a rival business next door to yours – might not all that induce in quite ordinary normal people much such a state of mind as that of the cornered rat biting frantically and blindly at anything within reach? Caught in the tangle that is the world to-day, bewildered, desperate, frantic, what wild ways of escape might not even such as little peaceful Humphreys seek?

The war tried humanity too highly, and men and nations broke beneath the strain, often reacting strangely and dreadfully. Now the peace, too, tries some beyond their strength, and they, too, at times, react strangely – and even dreadfully.

Besides, there was always the possibility, as Major Griggs had pointed out, that the death of Miss Barton – if she were dead – had not been premeditated, that it had been, in fact, almost accidental.

As gently as he could, for, in spite of the terrible suspicion that hung about them, he could not help feeling a little sorry for a couple so plainly weak and inadequate, Bobby began his questioning. They admitted their identity at once – indeed, they could not well deny it. But, beyond that, they took refuge in a dull and stubborn reticence. It was true they had sold their business in Brush Hill. If it was still closed, that was none of their affair. They did not know who the purchaser was! They had negotiated with a man who described himself as a lawyer, declared he was acting for a third party, and had offered a good price, cash down. They had asked no questions – why should they? They had required no references – why should they? The money offered, in pound notes, was reference enough. They had taken the price offered, delivered the key of the establishment, and walked out, and that was all they knew – or, Bobby thought, all they meant to tell.

Altogether, a most unsatisfactory interview, and any reference to Miss Barton was met by a shaking of heads, and a blank denial of knowing anything whatever about her.

Bobby gave it up, and came away with two firm convictions in his mind: first, that the pair of them had something to conceal; secondly, that they had probably been coached by some third person, in the background, in this very effective attitude they had adopted of sulky reticence and protestations of ignorance.

But, then, so far as he knew, there was no third person in the background, at least no trace of one that he could see, and no apparent connection that he could discover between them and anyone else who had anything to do with the Tudor Lodge affair.

Bobby sighed, and presently began to wonder whether he might not have considerably underestimated the capacity and determination of Mr and Mrs Humphreys, and whether possibly they were not a good deal less simple and timid and commonplace a couple than he had assumed.

Late as it was when Bobby got back to town, later still when he left headquarters after handing in his report to Inspector Ferris – Mitchell had left for the day – he did not return straight to his rooms, but instead made his way to Brush Hill.

For there was still running in his mind Mitchell's hint that some reason there must have been for Humphreys' certainly untrue boasting of the large profits he had been making by the sale of garden requisites. How these apparently merely foolish lies could be connected with the Tudor Lodge mystery Bobby could not imagine, but his inability to do so merely increased the young man's uneasy sensation that there was something in this talk of garden requisites he had overlooked but that Mitchell had perceived.

It was still light when Bobby reached Tudor Lodge. For a time public curiosity had been so great that a constable had had to be stationed outside the house, to restrain trespassers, watch the souvenir-hunters – who, under the influence of their peculiar mania, were quite capable of knocking bricks out of the walls or smashing in the doors and windows to ransack the interior – and of keeping the continually gathering crowds of spectators ‘moving on there, please'.

But public interest – a fire that needs continual feeding with fresh fuel – had died down. The Tudor Lodge affair had been dismissed from the prominence of front-page headlines to the obscurity of inside page bottom-of-the-column paragraphs, and the constable had been withdrawn. Bobby turned in unchallenged through the gap between the newly re-padlocked gate and the tumbledown front garden railings, and walked up the weed-grown drive. A moment or two he stood gazing up at the house where the missing woman had passed her long and dreadful and solitary existence, and then he walked on by the side of the building to where the garden sprawled its overgrown tangle of weed and grass and tree and bush.

It did not take him long to assure himself that that wilderness of half a century's neglect had not recently been disturbed in any way whatever. Everywhere the grass and the weeds showed themselves untrodden and untrampled. Across one path such a tangle of briar rose had spread itself as the legend tells protected the palace of the Sleeping Beauty from intrusion. The corresponding path on the left hand of the garden was choked in much the same way by a mingled growth of weed and creeper, and across the desolation that had once been a trim English lawn not even a cat could have made its way without leaving plainly visible tracks.

Nor was there any possibility of entering the garden in any other direction save through and across that of one of the neighbours. The vague notion Bobby had half entertained that the lost Miss Barton might have been murdered and her body buried in the garden, possibly by Humphreys using a spade taken from his ‘garden requisites', had therefore to be dismissed. Whatever had become of the missing woman, her body was certainly not lying in the garden of Tudor Lodge, and, indeed, Bobby was now inclined to wonder why he had ever seriously entertained such an idea. Not but that the whole place-the gloomy, neglected, closely-shuttered house, the overgrown and deserted garden – did not suggest the tomb. No more appropriate spot could be imagined, Bobby thought, than this for the murderer to hide the awful evidence of his crime, but it was self-evident no use had been made of the garden for that purpose; and then, as Bobby turned away to go home to the bed and sleep he was beginning to feel he needed badly, he saw a light flash out for an instant in one of the upper windows of the house.

Just at first he was half inclined to think he must have been mistaken. The light did not reappear. Everything had assumed again its aspect of age-long desolation and neglect. Besides, who, for what reason or purpose, could possibly be wandering about the old house at that time? It was nearly night outside now, and indoors must be quite dark.

Still, Bobby's memory of that momentary flash of light remained vivid, and he began to run, swift and silent and light-footed, till he came to the side door of the house. It was hanging an inch or two open. Someone then, it seemed, had another key besides that in the possession of the police. He opened the door and passed within.

He felt his breath coming a little more quickly than usual. He had an idea that possibly the solution of the mystery might be within his grasp. Perhaps Miss Barton had come back to her old refuge. That was not unlikely, Bobby thought, if she were in fact still alive. He felt a little pleased with himself that he had been sharp enough – lucky enough would have been a more modest thought – to notice that momentary flash that had told of the presence of someone in the building. Or perhaps it might be her murderer returned on some grim, secret errand, and in a moment or two Bobby would find himself at grips with him in a desperate struggle for life and death.

Light-foot and silent, he ran down the passage and on into the shadowed hall, whence the stairs led to the upper portion of the house. Here it was quite dark, and Bobby went more slowly for fear of stumbling, or of knocking over a chair or something else, and so giving the alarm and the advantage to whoever might be there; and then a familiar voice hailed him from above:

‘Mind you don't break your neck, Owen. Come up here. You haven't a torch with you, have you? Mine's about burnt out.'

‘Oh, is it you, sir?' stammered Bobby, slightly disconcerted as he recognised Mitchell's voice.

‘Who did you think it was?' retorted Mitchell with a sly chuckle. ‘Miss Barton kindly come back to save us any further trouble looking for her? I doubt whether she'll ever do that, poor soul. But at any rate she's not buried in the back garden, is she?'

‘No, sir,' agreed Bobby, as he made his way up the stairs. ‘But I've seen Humphreys, and she's not with him, and she must be somewhere.'

‘So you thought of the garden, eh, and remembered how Humphreys keeps talking about his big sales of garden stuff? Was that it?' asked Mitchell. ‘But if he had used any kind of garden stuff in a murder – even a spade for a secret burial – would he talk so much about it – about garden stuff, I mean? Though I agree he must have some reason for lying about his sales in the way he does. I would give a lot to know what's behind that boasting and lying of his. Must be something, but I can't imagine what. Anyhow, I'm glad you spotted that light I flashed for you to see.'

Bobby did not answer. He felt slightly disconcerted to find that the momentary flash he had been inclined to applaud himself for noticing had been in fact aimed at his attention. Mitchell was standing on the landing between two rooms – the one in which Miss Barton had apparently lived during her long solitary sojourn in the house and the large front room in which some of the furniture, and part even of the flooring, had been broken up for firewood. Mitchell had a torch in his hand but it had nearly run down. Bobby produced his, and Mitchell took it and flashed its ray across the landing, sometimes directing it to the floor, where the curious kind of path swept between the two rooms on the dusty moth-eaten carpet was still plainly visible, though even in the short time that had elapsed since their first visit a covering of fresh dust had fallen.

‘What made her turn tidy here and nowhere else in the whole blessed house?' Mitchell asked musingly. ‘There's no sign she ever used a broom in any other spot, and yet here every grain of sawdust and every chip has been swept up. Another thing, what did she use? There's no broom about that I can see.'

No, sir,' agreed Bobby. He said slowly: ‘I believe she's been murdered.'

‘I almost hope so, rather than that she's wandering about with her necklace, and a packet of arsenic to defend it and herself with against anyone she suspects of following her,' Mitchell said slowly, for that was the constant dread in his mind. ‘Perhaps it's neither, but a pearl necklace worth five figures or thereabouts in the possession of a half-crazy old woman is a big temptation. Why, it could be offered for sale in Bond Street to-morrow, and who could identify it? No risk in trying to dispose of it, so far as identification goes. How did you get on to-day?' he added.

Bobby gave a brief account of his visit to the Cotswold village, and Mitchell listened intently.

‘Doesn't take us much further forward,' he commented. ‘It looks as if Humphreys knows something he doesn't want to tell. And yet it seems hard to imagine that little rabbit of a man mixed up in it, either. That's one difficulty in this case – none of the people we know were hanging about Tudor Lodge seem of the murderer type. Con Conway's a little rat who would run from his own shadow; Humphreys is the perfect small-grocer type whose ideas of crime you wouldn't think went beyond false weights; Mr Yelton's a respectable business man who hasn't any ideas at all outside golf; young girls like his daughter aren't often murderers; Aske doesn't seem quite the type either. And yet, God knows, murder's a thing so easily done, and old Miss Barton must have been so frail, the slightest thing might have killed her – not meant at all; just a grab at the necklace, an effort at defence on her part, a scuffle, and there you are. But one thing's clear: we must have a look round Mr Humphreys' late establishment.'

‘Yes, sir, I'm sure we ought,' agreed Bobby, wondering, though, how Mitchell meant to gain admittance, and if he thought his case strong enough to apply for a search-warrant.

‘A strange case altogether,' Mitchell went on. ‘What a life the poor old soul must have led here all those years – and then her excursions to throw her money away anywhere and anyhow – I expect she thought it a kind of making up for what she had done. Strange, the things that go on behind the walls of the houses we pass every day.'

‘The biggest snag of all,' Bobby remarked, ‘seems to me that, even if we trace the pearl necklace, there's no way of identifying it.'