Mystery Villa (5 page)

‘For anyone living all alone and solitary,' Bobby remarked, ‘Miss Barton seems to have a good many callers.' Humphreys was now walking on towards them after his momentary pause. Wild said to him:

‘Afternoon – bringing the old lady her week's groceries?'

‘Nothing wrong, is there?' Humphreys asked.

‘What should be? Why do you ask?' Bobby interposed, slightly surprising Wild by slipping in this unexpected and abrupt question.

‘Boys kicked a football through one of the windows, that's all,' Wild said, subconsciously intending this as a kind of implied rebuke to Bobby for asking unnecessary questions.

But Bobby seemed to expect a reply, and was looking keenly at Humphreys, who, with the merest tinge of discomfort in his manner, answered:

‘When an old woman's living all alone, the way she does, you don't never know what mightn't happen – many's the time I've said to my missus: “Mark my words, some day she'll be found dead along of not looking after herself proper.” Besides which, it's tempting Providence living all alone in a big house, with thieves and burglars and smash-and-grab brigands going on the way they are, and the police never stopping 'em – though doing their best, of course, as we all know,' he added, with a deprecating glance at the sergeant, as if doubtful whether he had been prudent in permitting himself to repeat the criticism lately appearing in that special national paper from which he secured every morning, new and fresh, his opinions, his beliefs, and his creeds.

‘Not as many as there were,' said the sergeant firmly. ‘We've got the situation well in hand,' he pronounced, repeating, on his side, what the Home Secretary had remarked in a speech a day or two before. He added, glancing back over his shoulder at the shuttered, deserted, neglected-looking habitation they had just left, ‘Nothing much there for anyone, either; gas cut off; rates never paid – don't look like any money there.'

‘Stories get about sometimes, with very little foundation,' Bobby observed. ‘Are there any about Miss Barton, do you know?' he asked Humphreys.

‘None that I've ever heard tell,' Humphreys replied, with emphasis. ‘Anyways, none that come from me, I'll swear to that,' he added, with still greater emphasis – rather unnecessary emphasis, indeed — and with a somewhat oddly obstinate expression that Bobby noted, remembered, but could not understand.

‘There's no stories of that sort about,' confirmed Wild, with equal emphasis. ‘If there were, we should be the first to hear them. Everyone knows the poor way she lives.'

‘That's right,' agreed Humphreys. ‘Nothing there except spiders and mess and dirt.' He added, as if anxious to change the conversation, ‘Those boys did ought to be stopped, so they ought – smashing people's windows and everything.' Bobby was looking into the little man's basket. It contained bread, a packet of tea, a tin of condensed milk, and some candles and matches.

‘Doesn't she get more than that?' he asked.

‘Never more; sometimes less,' Humphreys answered. ‘Sometimes no matches wanted, and sometimes no candles; and sometimes neither of them, but only bread and tea and tinned milk – that's reg'lar, and has been for thirty years and more.'

‘But she must get more than that! From someone else, perhaps?' Bobby insisted.

‘Not that I knows of,' Humphreys replied. ‘And never any more from me. One Christmas after the war, when business was better, and a living to be made at it, which it isn't now, my missus, being soft-hearted like, put in a quarter of butter what was a bit too gone to sell, and a quarter of our best slab cake. Believe me or not, they wasn't touched – just left in the basket; and the missus says, well, if that's the way she takes it, we won't try no more; so we never did. As for her going anywhere else,' he went on, ‘why should she? me having served her, and give full satisfaction, for years and years, and then I've asked the neighbours, and they all say they never see anyone but me once a week reg'lar. If she went anywhere for personal shopping, most like we should hear of it; and then, too, she don't hardly ever go out, and if she does it's mostly after closing time. Of course, there's no saying for certain.'

While listening to this, Wild had been looking into the basket with an air of almost comical dismay and disapproval.

‘What a way to live,' he said. ‘I couldn't stand it – drive me dotty, it would. She must have been like anyone else at one time. How did she get the way she is now?'

Neither of the other two seemed disposed to offer any answer, and, indeed, Wild seemed a little surprised himself that it had come into his mind to ask the question.

‘Well, that's the way I feel about it,' he said, with an air of finality.

‘Strange to think,' agreed Bobby, ‘of anyone like that now as once a jolly little child or a happy young girl, and then growing into such a life. I suppose it comes about gradually. There may have been some reason at first; something happened perhaps, or perhaps it was just a gradual dying away of every interest.'

He turned and stared at the gloomy, deserted house behind as if in challenge; as if daring it to hold any longer its secret from him; as if, once again, he felt that odd, indefinable demand upon his mind that every unsolved problem seemed to make.

‘Do you never see her? Does she never come to the door?' he asked Humphreys.

‘Never set eyes on her since I don't know when,' Humphreys declared. ‘There's an outhouse near the back door – sort of tool-shed or something. She hangs a basket on a nail in it, with the money and a bit of paper to say what she wants, and next time I leave the order and the change, if any.'

‘About the money?' Bobby asked. ‘What is it, paper or silver, or gold?'

‘Gold?' repeated Humphreys, astonished. ‘Why, I ain't seen gold since – why, not since a gent came in to buy some cheese, and paid for it with a half sovereign the boy I had then didn't want to take, never having seen nothing like it; thought it was a counter or something. Luckily I came in in time, only, of course, I got rid of it again before the price went up the way it has now – which was sure to be the way of it,' he added, with a kind of early-Christian-martyr sigh. ‘Once in a while,' he went on, ‘she puts in a pound note, and I bring back the change; and then it always seems like I get the change again till it's all done, and then there's another pound note, and it's like that all the time.'

‘First there were sovereigns,' Bobby remarked, ‘then Treasury notes came in, and now we've Bank of England notes – if she's used them all in turn, she must have some regular source of income, some way of getting money somewhere to carry on with.'

‘Looks like it,' agreed Wild. ‘Gets it sent, perhaps – anyhow, it's not a police matter. How's business?' he added to Humphreys.

Humphreys hesitated, looked round, swelled perceptibly, and said, in a voice of mysterious importance:

‘Working it up.'

‘Are you, though?' said Wild, evidently astonished at the idea. ‘Getting on all right?'

‘Not so dusty,' admitted Humphreys. ‘Working it up,' he said again, as though he repeated some magic formula. ‘When we have, we'll sell out; and then, maybe, we'll buy another in Bournemouth, just for something to do and keep going on. In Bournemouth,' he repeated, and it was almost as though he sang the word, so that his little, worn, worried face lit up, while for an instant he stood in a glow of ecstasy, as the drab London scene faded from his sight, and he walked in a dream of Paradise, amidst perpetual sunshine and soft sea air and the scent of pines. ‘Bournemouth,' he said once more, very softly. ‘Me and the missus went there August Bank Holiday after we were married – before the war, that was – and, ever since, we've said, that's where we would go if we ever got the chance.'

He was so lost in this dream that had haunted all the days of his poor meagre little life, and that it seemed he thought might soon become a fact, as happens to so few, so very few, of the dreams of men, that Wild had to speak to him twice over before he realised he was being addressed again.

‘Glad to hear it,' Wild was saying. ‘I had an idea things down your way weren't so bright now they've changed the bus route.'

‘And a dirty trick that was, too; and quite uncalled for,' exclaimed Humphreys, jerked back to present-day surroundings by the memory of this outrage. ‘And something ought to have been done about it, but we're working it up all right..Working it up, we are,' he repeated, his tongue lingering lovingly over this phrase that was to him the key to open the earthly Paradise he knew as Bournemouth of the sea and the sun and the pine-scented air. ‘Going in for gardening stuff, we are now; one window full of it – tools and seeds and manures, and lawn sand and lime, and what not. Doing well, too; big profits in them lines.' He nodded, and went on towards the house, and as they, too, continued on their way, Wild remarked:

‘About the first time I've heard anyone say business was doing well, and I shouldn't have thought there was much of a demand for garden-stuff down where he is, or so much profit in it, either. If you ask me, they've as much chance of selling out for anything worthwhile as they have of winning the Irish Sweepstake. They'll never see Bournemouth on what they get for their little one-horse show.'

‘It's a queer affair altogether,' Bobby said, and he and Wild were still standing talking when Humphreys came back with an empty basket, Miss Barton's purchases having been deposited in the accustomed place. He made some vague remark as he passed, and Bobby was thinking, with gentle amusement, that the light in the little man's eyes and the smile lingering at the corners of his mouth were both due to his dear dream of Bournemouth, when there appeared from across the road an indignant housewife, who had evidently been watching for him.

She was in a state of high indignation. It seemed that the previous Saturday night an order of hers had been delivered all wrong – nothing that she wanted, and everything she didn't want, and too late for any correction to be made. There had been nothing for Sunday-morning breakfast, and she had had to leave her washing on Monday morning to go out and buy things. Her opinion of Mr Humphreys was emphatic and little flattering, and she was very scornful of his efforts to put the blame on his new man – ‘well-meaning and 'ard-working', Humphreys declared, but with no experience. The indignant lady denounced the new assistant in question as a great, tall, stupid thing, fit for nothing but standing outside the pictures and a way of talking as if he didn't think you good enough for his lordship's notice; and Humphreys protested that his new assistant was doing his best, but not used to the grocery business, having only come into it as a result of the general economic crisis, and glad of the chance, too.

But the indignant lady, memory of that meagre Sunday breakfast rankling in her mind, refused to accept this as an excuse, and leaving her still venting her wrath, and Humphreys still proffering meek excuse, Wild and Bobby walked away, the sergeant evidently very much impressed by so unexpected a revelation of a prosperity in the Humphreys' establishment sufficiently pronounced to permit of the employment of a full-time, grown-up assistant.

‘Though him doing well, and working it up on garden-stuff and suchlike,' said Wild, shaking his head in a mystified manner as he bade farewell to Bobby, ‘beats me clean, so it does; especially now the buses have changed their route.'

Again a day or two passed, and Bobby, busy with uninteresting routine work, found often breaking in upon his thoughts as he drew up statements, filled in forms, went here and there on one dull errand or another, the teasing, troubling memory of the shuttered house in Windsor Crescent, of the old woman he had never seen dragging out there her strange and drear existence, of the mystery of fear that seemed to hang about the place.

Nor, try as he might, could he imagine any reasonable cause for the extremity of terror that had seemed to be holding in its grip the girl whom he and Wild had seen there.

‘If there was anything or anyone scaring her,' he reflected, ‘she knew we were police, and she only had to say a word; and, if it was because we were police she was upset, she had only to keep the door shut. But it's not even reasonable to suppose there can be anything criminal happening in a house where an old woman has been living alone for half a century or so, when all the neighbourhood knows about her, and would spot it at once if there was anything unusual going on.'

Yet, in spite of himself, he could not help thinking that there must be some connection between the terror that had sent Con Conway flying in blind panic through the night and that other fear which so evidently the unknown girl was experiencing. Not that he could imagine how any such connection could exist, but it was in vain he tried to persuade himself that only coincidence linked together those two terrors. It was as though an intuition told him differently.

In a quiet, unofficial way he tried, too, to get in touch again with Con Conway. Having no desire to experience the riot of leg-pulling that he knew very well would ensue, he had made no report of the umbrella incident, and so could not explain why he was so anxious to find Conway. But that enterprising gentleman was evidently taking very good care to keep out of his way, realising, no doubt, how ardently Bobby longed for a quiet little private talk with him on the subject of umbrellas, and, indeed, he seemed to have vanished altogether from all his accustomed haunts. Sometimes Bobby wondered if this disappearance could have any connection with whatever it was had caused his panic on the night of their meeting, but that did not seem to him very likely. Sometimes, also, he wondered if the unknown girl, too, had vanished in the same way from her usual circle.