Mystery Villa (7 page)

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.'

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.

Next morning when he reached the Yard he was told there was a phone call for him, and when he answered it he found it was from Brush Hill – from Sergeant Wild.

‘It's a bit rummy,' Wild explained over the wire, when Bobby got through to him. ‘A lady came in last night about that Tudor Lodge. Says she lives next door.' (Bobby remembered, with some alarm, the patient watcher he had noticed at a near-by window the day before.) Says she used to see Miss Barton at night sometimes moving about, though she never gave anyone a chance to speak to her. Then she says, too, there used to be a light in the upstairs windows quite often, but there hasn't been recently, or any sign of the old woman herself either, and as the lady had seen us knocking – seems she saw you there yesterday, or so she says – she thought she would have a closer look herself. And when she was in the drive, prying around — only she doesn't put it that way – one of the windows on the ground floor next the front door on the left hand opened, and she saw a young man inside.'

‘A young man?' Bobby repeated.

‘She gives quite a good description of him – quite smart looking, she says; quite the gentleman. Only – this is the funny part – she says he had a pistol in his hand, and was looking at it. What do you make of that for a yarn?'

‘Sounds funny,' Bobby agreed. ‘Is she sure it was a pistol?' he added, with arrogant masculine incredulity. ‘Could it have been a cigar lighter, do you think?'

‘Well, there's that,' admitted Wild, ‘but she tells a good clear story, and she seems to have noticed everything about him from the colour of his tie to the shape of his nose. We think, here, we had better have a look round. Nothing in it, most likely, but you never know. Like to come along, if you can be spared, as you were with me when that girl came to the door? – and then there was that business about Con Conway.'

Thanks awfully for telling me,' Bobby exclaimed eagerly. ‘I'll come, if I can possibly wangle it. I'm sure it ought to be looked into.'

Probably the fact that he was a bit of a favourite with Superintendent Mitchell accounted for his success in obtaining this permission without too much trouble, though not without a sombre warning that if it turned out a wild-goose chase, and he proved to have wasted his morning and the time a hard-up country paid him for, then he must not be surprised if he found himself assigned to the next overtime job that came along.

Bobby reflected bitterly – though without saying so aloud – that probably that would have been his luck anyhow, especially if the job in question were rather specially dull, and, anyhow, the conviction that there was about Tudor Lodge something that needed investigation was growing ever stronger in his mind. Con Conway first and his strange panic, and then that young girl almost swooning with fear, and next the shop assistant on whom to the house had its influence of terror, and now this odd tale of a young man with a pistol in his hand.

Once he had the desired permission, it did not take him long to get to Brush Hill, where his ardour was a little damped by finding that the Inspector in charge didn't seem much interested.

‘Old lady getting her friends to look her up at last,' he suggested. ‘And there's a lot of young chaps like playing about with pistols – some of 'em don't even know they have to have a licence and are liable to a penalty without.

But Wild had plainly been impressed by the story told by their visitor of the night before. She was a Mrs Rice, and as her husband was a wireless operator on one of the Australian boats, and so was frequently away for long periods at a time, she had a good deal of leisure, and spent a good deal of it at her window, surveying the activities of the world in general and of her neighbours in particular. Her story had been well and clearly told, and her account of the young man she had seen a really good one. She described him as tall, slim and dark, good-looking, with a small Grecian nose over a small well-shaped mouth with ‘beautiful teeth' (Mrs Rice had grown almost lyrical over those teeth, which had evidently impressed her a good deal), and a round, slightly prominent chin. She spoke of his thin, dark, eager face, and of his well-knit, athletic form, and of a certain grace and ease in his bearing. She had noticed, too, his smart well-cut lounge suit (‘West-end, if you ask me,' said Mrs Rice), his soft grey Trilby hat, and fashionable pigskin gloves. She had even noticed, and could describe his necktie (‘wanted someone to choose it for him,' commented Mrs Rice – ‘yellow and green in bars, it was, with blue and red spots, a fair horror, beats me how a smart young fellow, quite the gentleman, could go and spoil himself like that'), and equally well the pistol he had been holding, so that Bobby's tentative theory that it had really been a cigar lighter had to be dropped. Mrs Rice described it as small, with a gleaming mother-of-pearl handle, and it was clearly a revolver, not an automatic, and probably of a somewhat old-fashioned type.

All this had been carefully noted down, and, after Bobby had read it, he and Wild started off, the Inspector giving them a last sardonic warning to be careful what they did, and to mind they kept each other out of mischief.

‘You haven't got a search warrant in your pockets, you know,' he reminded them; ‘and remember, you'll easily get yourself into trouble if you try any breaking and entering and it turns out not justified.'

‘Oh, no, sir,' protested Bobby. ‘I'm sure we never thought of anything like that. We'll just have a general look round and see if Mrs Rice has anything more to say.'

‘Well, perhaps it's best not to let people have a chance of complaining we don't pay any attention to what they tell us,' admitted the Inspector, returning to his pile of reports and returns he was busy filling up.

But his observations had their effect on Wild, who began to look a little uneasy, and when they got to Windsor Crescent enquired, uncomfortably, how they were going to begin.