Mystery Villa (8 page)

‘We'll knock first,' Bobby said. ‘All things in order.'

But to Bobby's knocking no answer came, and Wild said: ‘You can knock for donkey's years, but you'll never get an answer – no one ever does.'

‘No answer is a kind of answer just as not being is a kind of being, as someone once said, once upon a time,' Bobby observed. ‘How about having a look at the side door?'

‘May as well,' agreed Wild, ‘but, if you ask me, there's nothing in it, except the old party's gone dotty living alone, and the young chap Mrs Rice saw was a doctor fetched in to have a look at her – very like by that smart little girl me and you saw, if you remember.'

Bobby agreed carelessly that he remembered her more or less clearly, but couldn't agree that the young man Mrs Rice talked about was likely to be a doctor.

‘Why should a doctor be carrying a pistol?' he asked.

‘Well, I suppose,' agreed Wild, ‘it's more pills than pistols they use to finish you off with.'

Pleased with the good old fruity flavour of this jest, he went, quite willingly, with Bobby round to the side of the house. There everything appeared as it had done before. Bobby looked inside the outbuilding near the back door, and peered into the basket hanging there, wherein Humphreys' assistant had deposited the bread and tinned milk he had delivered. The basket was empty now, so presumably Miss Barton had come down later on to get her purchases. Bobby went back to the side door, and, while Wild looked on without much interest, he knocked. There was still no answer, so he tried the handle and found the door secure. Pie left it, and went to the still unmended window the football had broken. He said to Wild:

‘How about getting in here?'

Wild hesitated. In the portly maturity of his twenty-two years' service he had no taste for scrambling through windows, even those on the ground floor. But Bobby was already on the sill.

‘It can't have been open for years,' he said. ‘The catch has rusted into place.'

But, if the rust of so many years had fixed the catch into place, it had also eaten its strength away, and as Bobby struggled with it, his hand through the gap the football had made, it gave way suddenly, breaking in half. With some difficulty still, Bobby forced up the reluctant sash and then stepped inside.

Within, the walls were black with the dust of years, the floor was covered with a damp and rotting oilcloth, and on the accumulated dust that covered it could be seen distinctly a trail of small footsteps, where, presumably, the girl they had seen there had come to retrieve the football she had returned to them. Neither table nor chairs were to be seen, but an old-fashioned mangle stood near one wall, and a small bracket supported one of the circular knife-cleaning machines, once so necessary an adjunct to every house. Both articles were so wreathed in cobwebs as to be hardly recognisable. In a corner stood the sink wreathed in cobwebs too, and with taps black with age and neglect.

‘No one's been getting water here,' Bobby reflected. ‘I wonder how they've managed? – bathroom, perhaps.' The decrepit door, hanging insecurely on one hinge, the other having apparently crumbled away, stood half open. Bobby went through it and out into the passage, where, too, dust and grime lay everywhere, and cobwebs hung festooned on every side.

For a moment he stood still, and then, with the full force of his lungs, he shouted:

‘Is there anyone here? Police making enquiries. Anyone here?'

His voice echoed strangely through the empty rooms and deserted passages, but no answer came. Only the spiders scuttled on the walls and the moths fluttered to and fro, and the astonished mice peeped from their holes to discover what was happening. Twice he repeated his summons, shouting with all his power. When he still got no reply, save that of the universal silence into which his loud cry entered and was lost, he went back to the side door. It was provided with a self-locking latch, easily opened from within. He opened the door, and said to Wild, waiting outside: ‘I've been calling, but no one answered.'

‘I heard you,' Wild said. ‘Enough to wake the dead, it was.'

‘It takes a lot to wake the dead,' Bobby answered, shivering a little in spite of himself, for this strange, drear place was having its effect upon him.

‘Well, what's the next move?' Wild demanded.

‘Better have a good look round,' Bobby suggested.

‘Suppose someone comes along, and wants to know what we're up to?' Wild asked uneasily. ‘What'll we say?'

‘Acting on information received, we felt it our duty to make enquiries to assure ourselves all was in order and no assistance required,' replied Bobby promptly. ‘That's all.'

‘Got a gift for telling 'em, you have,' Wild said, with grudging admiration, as he entered the passage. ‘Comes of all this education, most likely. What's that noise?'

‘Mice, that's all,' answered Bobby.

They walked along the passage, and entered a large room it led to that had evidently been the kitchen. It presented the same picture of utter desolation. At one side stood an enormous old-fashioned cooking range, and there was a huge open dresser occupying almost all one wall. There was an open knife-basket standing on it, containing knives of which rust had eaten away the blades, and spoons and forks that were quite black. On the floor, before one of the shuttered windows, was a broken bird-cage, that had apparently dropped when the cord whereby it had been suspended had rotted through. By the light of the electric torch Bobby was using in these dim places whence shutter and blind had excluded the light of day for forty years or more they could distinguish a pinch of dust at the bottom of the cage – all that was left, they supposed, of what once had been a pet canary, decayed there into that tiny residue. In this room, too, cobwebs hung everywhere, and spiders scuttled to and fro in alarm at so unwonted an intrusion upon their quiet. In one corner was a door, covered with cobwebs like a curtain. Bobby pulled it open, and found it admitted to a larder or pantry with many dishes, all empty, still standing there.

‘Do you notice there don't seem to be any chairs, or any table either?' Bobby remarked.

‘I never saw such a place in my life,' asserted Wild.

In the range, there were still a few cinders, or, rather, remnants of them that crumbled at a touch, and Bobby wondered to himself how long it was since last a fire had been lighted there to spread its friendly warmth through this dank place. They went back into the passage, and found another room that must have been a butler's pantry. There was a sink here that had evidently been in use at a not-too-distant date, and was probably where water had been obtained. Against one wall stood a safe. The door was open, and it seemed empty.

‘Silver all gone,' Wild remarked. ‘That's been seen to, anyhow.'

There were other domestic offices – all of them in the same state of neglect, all showing the same accumulated dust of years. They found some steps leading down to cellars, one evidently intended for coal, but swept quite clear, with not a trace of any coal left in it. Another had apparently been used as a kind of laundry, for it contained another mangle, and an old-fashioned stove for heating irons, and of a third the door was locked. Bobby hazarded a guess that it might be the wine cellar, and that possibly it might still hold wine though it had no appearance of having been opened for many years. Another cellar seemed to have been used chiefly for rubbish, empty bottles and jars, some rotting garden-hose, something that looked as if it had once been a sewing-machine, and so on.

‘If you notice, there's no wood lying about,' Bobby observed. ‘It looks to me as if anything with wood in it had been broken up, and the wood used for fuel. I shouldn't wonder if that isn't why Humphreys was never asked to supply any coal. The way the cellar's cleaned out looks to me as if what coal there was was used up first, and, after that, any wood that was handy. Strikes me that's why there don't seem to be any chairs or tables – they've all been smashed up for fuel, too.'

They went back up the steps, and then through to the front of the house. Here, again, Bobby shouted, at the full strength of his lungs, to know if anyone was in the house, and again he got no reply.

Here, too, in this that had evidently been the part of the house occupied by its owners, there reigned everywhere the same complete desolation and neglect. Spiders and cobwebs were in full possession, and everywhere could be seen evidence of the ravages of damp and rust that for more than a generation had had their way unchecked. In one place, part of the ceiling had fallen, but evidently years ago, for the heap of plaster on the floor was black with age and covered with dust, and the scantling its fall had displayed was hidden under a curtain of cobwebs. At the back of the house, running nearly its full length, was the drawing-room, a fine, well-proportioned apartment, furnished in the style that was generally approved half a century ago – that is, with a great number of small, spindly chairs and occasional tables, a mahogany sofa, with a back and headpiece in carved scroll work, and an abundance of china ornaments, photograph-frames, and so on. The sofa itself and the armchairs still showed the antimacassars of the period, and on the open piano still stood a piece of music – a copy of Mendelssohn's ‘Spring Song'. Bobby found himself wondering how many springs had come and gone since that had first been placed there.

‘If you ask me,' said Wild, as though answering the thought in Bobby's mind, sinking, as he spoke, his naturally loud and cheery voice to the hoarse whisper he would have thought appropriate in church, ‘there's been nobody in here for donkey's years.'

‘Looks like it,' Bobby agreed; and added: ‘Do you notice how many vases and bowls are standing about? They look to me as if they had all once had flowers in them.'

It was not too easy to see clearly in the obscurity of this closely shuttered room where no light had penetrated for so many years. But Wild went tiptoeing across the floor to examine more closely the bowls and vases Bobby referred to. He came back, and said:

‘It's all turned to dust long ago, but there's been flowers in 'em all. When this room was shut up, it must have been a bower of flowers.'

They went out again into the passage, and Wild, wiping his forehead, said:

‘Well, this beats me; never known anything like this since I joined the force.'

The room they entered next was evidently the one that had been the library, though the books that once had lined the walls were now piled upon the floor in a damp-stained, mice-gnawn confusion, while the shelves on which they had been ranged had apparently been torn down and taken away. The chairs, too, seemed to have been broken up, for remnants of what had apparently once been leather seats were piled in a corner. Attempts, too, had evidently been made to smash up the solid mahogany table, for it had had splinters broken off it and showed other marks of blows received, but the Victorian joiners had made it to last, and apparently the effort to reduce it to firewood had been turned to furniture of lighter make. From under it Wild produced a small hatchet, with an edge much used and battered.

‘Looks like what was being used,' he observed. ‘One way of getting firewood – smashing up the happy home all right.'

They went next into the room at the front of the house in which Mrs Rice said she had seen the dark young man with the pistol in his hand. It had probably been intended for the breakfast-room, and here all the furniture, or rather all of it that could be burnt, seemed to have disappeared. Against one wall lay a rotting pile of the upholstered seats and backs of chairs and so on, and in one or two places parts of the floor boarding had been pulled up, or attempts made to do so.

‘Burning the house down bit by bit to keep herself warm – that's what she was doing,' observed Wild. ‘Well, I've never seen anything like this,' he repeated.

In the middle of the room, and reaching right across the floor to the inner wall, was that great pile of papers, circulars and unopened letters that Bobby had had a glimpse of before.

‘Take some sorting out,' Bobby remarked, thinking ruefully of that pile of anonymous letters he had recently dealt with, and aware of a chilly fear that, if the need arose, he might very likely be allotted the job of going through this enormous accumulation.

They went back into the hall, and across it, and opened the door of the dining-room.

‘My God!' Wild muttered. ‘Look at that.'

Down the full length of the room ran a table, or, more probably, two or three put together, laid with linen that had once been white, with glass that once, no doubt, had shone, with silver now almost perfectly black, with plates and dishes, wine-glasses, decanters. At one end, the fireplace end, another table ran at right angles to the first, and on it stood an enormous five-tiered wedding-cake, crowned with Cupids and bells. Thanks to the thick coating of sugar covering it, and the fact that the stand on which it was placed had a stem spreading outwards at its summit, so that mice had not been able to climb up, this cake was the one thing in the house that appeared to have been able to resist the passage of the years. But for the thick dust that lay on it, and for a web a spider had spun from its culminating Cupid to a decanter near, still full of wine, it looked much as it must have done when it had first been placed there with pride and joy and laughter, symbol of present festivity and of happiness to come.

‘My God!' Wild said again, more loudly; and a little mouse that had been sitting upright on the table, as if paralysed with surprise and indignation at this intrusion on its traditional privacy, gave a sudden squeak of protest and vanished in an angry scutter.

Ghostly and strange beyond imagination showed in the dim light of that long-deserted room this table spread for a meal no guest had ever sat to, whereon the food and the drink had waited while the long years passed and wars and empires thundered to their end, where the empty chairs still stood in line ready to welcome the bridal party who never came, where the busy spiders span their webs about the five-tiered wedding-cake.