Bones in the Barrow (25 page)

“Which might, perhaps, be his real name?” suggested David.

“No. I told you we have not traced anyone answering to the description, working in Boxwood, called Peter, who also knows Shirley Gardiner.”

“You haven't surely had time to cover the whole of Boxwood.”

“Perhaps not.”

“How will you work this showdown?”

“Take Shirley to the main entrance at the station and let her go to the up-platform in the way she always does. She says Eric Ford crosses the bridge, to it. So would anyone coming into the station from the direction of the shopping centre. I shall have men posted at this entrance and also at the one to the up-platform. They will note anyone likely, and pass it on to men on the platform itself.”

“I think I will go on to the up-platform from the other side, a minute or two before the train is due,” said David. “Eric Ford should then have arrived, or be just arriving, to join Shirley. I shall have Terry with me.”

“Keep out of it,” said Johnson. “You can watch if you like; you deserve that, certainly. But don't throw a spanner in the works.”

“I promise,” said David, and meant what he said.

At five forty-two Shirley Gardiner, waiting terrified on the up-platform at Boxwood Station, looked anxiously, but in vain, for her doubtful friend. On the other side, but standing back in the shadow of the station roof, were David and Terry. The former of these two was watching the opposite platform. He saw that the station bookstall was closed, with its shutter drawn. He had never looked at it from this position before, at a distance, across the line.

Shirley was looking at the bridge. A familiar figure had just climbed the stairs and was proceeding across the flat part over the line. Steeling her heart, she waved. This was Johnson's agreed signal. He and two men with him moved out of the platform waiting room.

The signal bell for the train rang twice, and the signal fell with its usual deliberate clonk.

At this moment David sprang forward to the edge of the platform. Opposite him he was seeing the bookstall in a fresh light. The boards below the green shutter yelled at him; those advertised names, which no one ever bothered to look at.
Picture Post. Evening Standard. Times. Economist. Reynolds's News
.

“Peter!” shouted David, and again, “Look at the bookstall! Peter!”

With Terry at his heels he ran rapidly across the bridge.

As they rushed past him, a hoarse cry came from the man moving down from the bridge. He jumped the last six stairs in one bound, nearly fell, recovered himself, and leaped at David. The train appeared on the bend, moving rapidly into the station.

Terry Byrnes wasted no time on warning cries. He had kept his eyes on Shirley, as much because hers was the only face worth looking at on the platform, as because she was the key to the solution of his drama. He had seen her signal, and had then stared hard at the man crossing the bridge, but had seen nothing he recognized. He knew David's voice, however, and the man's reaction to it was unmistakable. When he leaped at David, Terry launched himself at once across the murderer's path.

They came down together, rolling nearly to the edge of the platform. David, who had sprung round at once when he heard the man call out, had time to fling himself against Terry as the train came in. The three of them were at the extreme edge of the platform as it passed them. But Johnson and his men were also on the spot, and the quarry was secured before he could recover his feet. David and Terry slowly extricated themselves from the melee.

“Thank you,” said David. “He would have put me under the train, if you had not jumped in as you did.”

“I'd have been under if you hadn't stopped me,” said Terry breathlessly.

“Oh, David,” said Jill, running up, “are you all right?”

At the back of the platform, where Jill had left her, Mrs. Bracegirdle said, “There now! If it isn't Mr. Norris himself!” But one of the policemen hurried her away, before she could speak to him.

“I thought I told you not to throw a spanner in the works,” Johnson said to David, as the latter turned, an arm round Jill.

“It's been there for us to see all the time,” said David, hazily. “Peter. Just as Mrs. Hilton must have looked at it every time she went to London. She called him Peter because the advertisement boards on his bookstall had capital letters that made up ‘Peter.' A silly whimsy, but she was like that, poor woman.”

As Chief-Inspector Johnson said afterwards, the end of it was really too easy. By attacking David on the platform at Boxwood the murderer laid himself open to a perfectly straightforward charge of assault. And he played still further into the hands of the police by saying he lost his head when David pushed past him and seemed to be making for his girl friend.

Johnson took him to the Boxwood Police Station, seeming to accept this explanation. The charge was made and the man, who now gave his name as Arthur Young, was taken into custody for the night.

“There seems to be a bit of a mix-up,” said Johnson. “Your young lady doesn't know you by that name. She knows you as Eric Ford.”

The prisoner had no answer to this, but repeated that his name was Arthur Young, and that he was employed by the big firm of stationers that ran the bookstall on Boxwood Station. He did not seem to be unduly concerned at the way things had gone. Nor surprised to find himself arrested by three plain-clothes detectives.

But the next morning brought him a painful and secretly dreaded surprise. He found himself in the yard behind the Police Station being lined up with various other men of his height and general appearance; one of them was Alastair Hilton.

“What's this in aid of?” he asked the constable who led him out. He had not slept very well, and his breakfast had not been what he considered adequate. He felt irritable. He wanted to appear before the magistrates, pay his fine, make his apology, and be dismissed.

“What's the idea?” he said again, more angrily.

“You wait and see,” replied his escort. “Get over there in line and shut your trap.”

The row of waiting men opened their ranks unwillingly to admit Arthur Young, and two constables took up positions behind the row of backs.

The next move found Young steeled to show indifference, but as figure after figure emerged into the yard, led by Chief-Inspector Johnson, and as each in turn singled him out with no hesitation whatever, and as he heard the string of names which he had thought were buried with each incident in the concealment of his crime, he realized the extent of discovery, and knew that he was lost.

To the other men, standing there, the occasion became a little ludicrous. For the identifiers were nearly all women, and of a type made absurd by the music halls. One after another the landladies came out to recognize the man who had deceived them. Mrs. Bracegirdle came first. She recognized Peter Norris without any trouble at all. Had already recognized him at the railway station. She'd always had her doubts that the poor woman was not his wife. When he didn't pay the rent Mrs. Norris sometimes gave her an article of clothing or a piece of jewellery to cover it. But in the end she had to get rid of the pair, keeping their suitcases, of course, as a deposit.

It was impossible to stop this flow of revelation, so Mrs. Bracegirdle was hurried away, still talking, to make her deposition elsewhere. Mrs. Hunt of Waterbury Street took her place, and after her Mrs. Field, for good measure, and so Harold Rust was secured. And then yet another landlady came, owner of lodgings where Arthur Young, under his real name, was now living. Her appearance seemed to give him a more substantial existence than the others.

After that, Joe, from the Royal Arms, pointed out Young as the man on the motor-bike, and old Harding recognized him as the man to whom he had lent his barrow. Two waitresses from Bloomsbury knew him as the husband of a Mrs. Hilton they used to serve. And a neat, polite person, representing a firm that dealt in refrigerators, picked out a former client, Philip Goode.

Finally Shirley Gardiner, protesting that she had already told them who he was, pointed to him as Eric Ford, and went away to sign her statement that he had made her a present of a brooch some eight weeks before.

For an identification parade, it was startlingly successful. The links had been widely separated, but this morning's work brought them together at last, and welded them into a chain that was to bind Young's guilt upon him in a way that gave him no slightest hope of escape.

Towards the end of September of that year, David and Jill went down to Duckington to spend a quiet week end at the White Hart. The holidays were over, and their family back at their respective schools. After the sorting and packing, and sewing on the name tapes, Jill felt she deserved a rest.

In the residents' lounge they were surprised to find Alastair Hilton, sitting near a cheerful wood fire. They had not seen him since Young's trial: he looked remarkably improved in health.

“Down for the week end, too?” asked David.

“Down for good,” said Hilton. He told them he had felt he could not go on living at Boxwood with its bitter memories, and that he had realized he was hardly capable of continuing to work at his business.

“I've sold out,” he said. “And I wonder I didn't think of it before. Mrs. Norbury has taken me on as a permanent guest. She has given me one of the best rooms in the house. It looks out on the downs—magnificent view. I feel I shall live to a hundred.”

They chatted for a time, and then Jill and David went to their room.

“The White Hart and Mrs. Norbury seem to have worked a miracle,” said Jill. “I didn't think we were ever likely to see him again. The day Young was sentenced, I thought he would collapse any minute. He really does look as if he'd live to a hundred, as he said.”

“He won't do that,” said David. “But he may be good for another ten years, with luck. Mrs. Norbury has it in hand, I think.”

“Good luck to them,” said Jill. “He deserves a break, if anyone does.”

“I think he's getting over it,” said David. “He is not a vindictive man, but it's a savage world, and it must have been heartening for him the day Young was hanged.”

Hilton had indeed recovered, as far as he was able to do so. Much as he had loved Felicity, he had always been made to feel, during their marriage, that its failure was his fault, and his alone. Relief from his derogation was sweet, and Mrs. Norbury's gentle regard even sweeter. His self-respect had returned to him.

That evening he invited David and Jill to coffee in his room after dinner. And when they were comfortably disposed round his fire, he began, without hesitation or apparent pain, to talk about the case.

“They tell me Terry Byrnes has gone into the Police Force,” he said. “Or intends to do so, after his military service. He'll be a very useful member, I should think.”

“It was the nice things the judge said to him that made up his mind,” said Jill. “About having shown himself a good citizen, and on the side of the law. And that if it hadn't been for him the crime might never have been disclosed.”

“I don't think that was strictly true,” said David. “Terry quite accidentally saw the crime committed, but the finding of the bones on the roof was bound to happen sooner or later, because all roofs are visited for repairs sooner or later. They would have lasted, even in their exposed position, for a very long time, and they were unusual enough to rouse curiosity about their origin in almost anyone.”

“Janet Lapthorn, too,” said Hilton, “being Janet, was bound to act as she did. And after a time, even without the other information, I should have acted myself, and probably been convicted.”

“No,” said David. “You could not have been confused with Rust. And I think that, even without Terry, the case would have developed exactly as it did. Because the murderer arranged his own destruction.”

There was a silence, while Hilton thought this over.

“Yes. I suppose you are right,” he said at last. “He shouldn't have tried to mix me up in it.”

“Exactly. If he had done nothing, we should never have got him. He was clever enough to leave no links between Norris, Goode, Rust, and Young. But he overdid his cleverness. He wanted more. He wanted revenge.”

“Revenge?” said Hilton and Jill together.

“Revenge for the dreadful position he felt you had put him in. As you know from the trial, he was a gambler and always out of funds. Also, he was full of envy of the prosperous people, like Basil Sims, whom he saw every day waiting for the business train, while he could do nothing better than stand, selling them newspapers. He was certainly attracted by your wife, but he was attracted more by her position, as he thought of it, and by her supposed wealth. After she went to live with him I think he expected an easy divorce, and alimony that would give him all the extra money he needed. He must have been bitterly disappointed by your stand. How much worse would he feel when he realized, as he must have done, that Mrs. Hilton was getting upset and frightened by their position and their increasing poverty! That motor-bike, secondhand though it was, must have made quite a hole in their income.”

“So you think he planned to kill her and put the blame on me?”

“No. It is possible, but he was not cool or calculating. He was a person who lost his head and his temper very easily. He proved that on several occasions. No. We can't be sure what happened that foggy night in November, but we do know that Mrs. Bracegirdle refused to have them in her house any longer, and threatened to call the police. That would have meant ruin for him: publicity would have lost him his job, as well as Felicity. I think they went off together, and in desperation, trying to keep her with him, he broke into that ruined house, and they spent the night there. Miserably enough, in the dark, with only a few old dirty decayed blankets to lie on. I think that by the morning your wife had made up her mind to return to you. She must have told him so, and in his irritation, from the discomfort and the continuing fog, and his realization of his failure, his many failures, I think he worked himself into a violent rage, which so frightened her that she rushed away from him into that room overlooking the railway, trying to escape, trying to call for help. Immediately afterwards he had enough to do concealing the crime; but after that he had to try to move his load of guilt: he tried to put it upon you, because your understanding and forgiving attitude to your wife had taken her from him even before he took her life.”