Murder in the Museum, A British Library Crime Classic (16 page)

So he smiled gratefully at Inspector Bowes as they made their way towards the waiting car, and waved his hand to the local man as he stood on the step of the police station and watched them move slowly off across the rough, cobbled street.

It was a nightmare drive, and Shelley found himself comparing it with a previous occasion when he had been engaged on a similar chase across the dreary waste of Dartmoor. Now here he was engaged on a chase across another moor, some hundreds of miles farther north, and with, he hoped, a similarly successful conclusion ahead.

He found himself comparing the two scenes. Dartmoor, with its sudden outcrops of grey granite, its main colour purple and grey. Here the land was more dismal and yet no less fascinating. Its mixtures of brown and fawn were delightful to the eye. And Shelley sometimes had the eye of an artist.

He recalled that it was not far from here that the Brontë sisters had eaten their hearts out in a country parsonage, and he admitted that the gloom of
Wuthering Heights
was understandable in such an atmosphere of cruel, bitter rocks and hills.

He thought, too, of the strangeness of fate, that had led him from the British Museum, centre of civilisation, to the bitter waste of a Yorkshire moor, still more or less as it had been when primitive man hunted his prey, the road a mere pale ribbon stretching over the endless hills.

But he was brought up with a jerk. The car had stopped.

“Blackdown House, sir,” explained Constable Cartwright, and Shelley smiled.

“Good,” he said. “Now for dear Mr. Wallace.” He opened the door of the car and alighted. Cunningham, Henry Fairhurst, and Constable Cartwright followed him. They stood in the road and looked up at the dreary bulk of grey stone that towered its three tall stories above them.

Chapter XX

At Blackdown House

Blackdown House was quite an imposing place. It was built plainly, of a dull grey stone, and it was much taller than the other houses in the street. They were dwarfed in comparison, even though they were far from being the “workmen's cottages” which were to be found in neighbouring streets.

Shelley looked up at it with some concern. He had brought an automatic pistol with him, but he did not want to use it if its use could possibly be avoided. Yet there was no getting away from the fact that the man they were after was a double murderer, who would not hesitate to kill again if he thought that his ends could best be achieved by such means.

Shelley pondered the problem for a moment with wrinkled brow. The others looked at him, eager to do something but waiting for a lead from him before they decided what that “something” could be.

“The straightforward way seems the best,” said Shelley.

“Okay, sir,” answered Cunningham, and marched to the door of Blackdown House. Seizing the gnarled old knocker with his right hand, he banged it resolutely two or three times, arousing resounding echoes in the old house. Then they all waited for the result.

There was no result. The house stared at them solemnly, as if defying them to do their worst. But there was certainly no reply.

“Who lives here, Cartwright?” asked Shelley. “Do you happen to know?”

“Ay.”

“Well, who is it?”

“A fellow called Ramsbottom. He's lived here for years and years.”

“Is he often away from home?”

Cartwright shook his head sadly. “Can't say as I've ever heard of him leaving Penistone in his life,” he said.

Shelley was disappointed. He had hoped that this was their goal at last, but the outlook, which had been quite promising, suddenly took on a more sinister appearance. It might be that they were climbing up the wrong tree after all. He tried not to feel too pessimistic about the whole affair, but he tried in vain. Then—quite suddenly—another thought came into his mind.

“Has he got a beard?”' he asked.

“Ay,” answered Cartwright, and Shelley's heart sang again.

“Try again, Cunningham,” he ordered, and Cunningham obeyed. He gave a perfect fusillade of knocks, awaking all the nooks and corners of the place, until housewives in other houses down the street threw open doors and poked inquisitive noses out of bedroom windows to see what was amiss. Still there was no reply. The house might have been an abode of the dead.

“Once more,” said Shelley grimly, and Cunningham willingly complied.

This time there was some response. Shelley was watching the mysterious house with great care, and he saw a flutter of a window-blind in one of the rooms in the top story. It was the merest movement, and to a less observant eye it would doubtless have passed unnoticed. Not so with Shelley. He missed nothing.

“There's someone in,” he announced. “Watch that blind up there, Cunningham. There it goes again!” And certainly the blind had been lifted the smallest fraction of an inch, as if someone inside had endeavoured to peer out to see who was disturbing the peace of this still somnolent street.

“Bang again, Cunningham,” he ordered, “and go on banging until there's some response. That's the only way that we shall get anywhere. Whoever he is, he's hiding himself away damned mysteriously. Still, I don't want to break the door down if I can possibly avoid it. After all, the man may be innocent. This may not be the place we're after, and we don't want to make fools of ourselves to that extent, do we?”

Cunningham seized the door-knocker in a resolute grip, took a deep breath, and hammered away unmercifully for a full half-minute. Then he paused for breath, took a grip of the knocker once more, and prepared to make another fiendish din. It was not often that one had a chance, in the middle of a difficult case, to “let off steam” in this manner, and Cunningham was firmly resolved to make the most of the opportunity while it lasted. But it was not to last much longer. Before he had a chance to start again on his banging activities, Shelley stopped him with a wave of an imperious hand.

“I think he's opening the window,” he said. And, as usual, Shelley was right.

The window of the room in the top story, the room the window-blind of which they had previously seen quivering, slowly opened. They looked up, wondering what the result might be. A head looked out, and a quavering voice enquired: “What's all the row about down there?”

Shelley looked at the face that was disclosed to their view. At once he was compelled to admit that, unless this was the most brilliant of disguises, it could not be the man they were after.

The man who gazed down at them, his eyes screwed up in the difficult task of vision, was old, incredibly old. His face was a mass of wrinkles, and his beard was a dirty white. Shelley could not, from that distance below, see what the old man was clothed in, but what was visible appeared to be the collar of a very dirty old nightshirt.

Shelley cursed that he had not thought of asking Cartwright the colour of the old man's beard. Then he might have been prepared for this shock. Still, better late than never, so he turned to Cartwright with a somewhat sheepish grin.

“That Mr. Ramsbottom?” he asked quietly.

“Ay,” answered Cartwright, and Shelley groaned. It looked as if they were on the wrong track after all, for certainly this old fogey was not the man they were after. Yet it was just barely possible that their enemy was hidden somewhere in the house, so they must make some sort of attempt to get in.

“We're the police,” he shouted back. “Hunting an escaped prisoner.”

“Eh?” The old man appeared to be rather deaf.

On Shelley repeating his request to find the escaped prisoner, however, the old man seemed to understand what they were getting at. At any rate he acquiesced, and promised to come down and let them in. Then he slammed down the window with a vicious bang, and they settled down, as patiently as possible, to another wait, which, truth to tell, seemed even longer than the previous one, for then they had the active interest of knocking and watching to see if the knock would draw forth any response.

Eventually, however, the old man opened the door to them, and, grumbling under his breath about people who came disturbing peace-loving citizens in the middle of the night, led the way indoors.

He was, as Shelley had surmised, dressed in a long nightshirt which might once have been cream-coloured with stripes of some darker colour, but which now, by dint of many washes at infrequent intervals, had turned into a kind of indeterminate grey.

“Now, what is it that you want, lads?” he asked as soon as they reached the sitting-room, which was crowded with the most incredible mixture of Victorian bric-à-brac. “Old junk,” was Shelley's mental comment, but he was careful not to let his distaste become obvious.

He proceeded to explain: “There's a dangerous criminal escaped, sir,” he said, “and we have reason to believe that he has sought refuge in your house. We want you to allow us to search the place, so that we can either catch him or else make sure that he isn't here.”

“Eh, but that's bad news,” was the old man's comment. “But how do you know that he's in this house?”

“We don't know for certain,” Shelley explained patiently. “It's only a suspicion. But, you see, suspicion is generally about all we have to go on in our job.”

The old man looked at them with an eye from which, in spite of his great age, all shrewdness had not yet departed, and then said: “But if there's a criminal in this house, lads, how do you reckon he got in? Answer me that.”

“All sorts of ways,” said Shelley, feeling decidedly uncomfortable, and suspecting that the old man was getting rather the best of this argument, and might well be merely talking and making futile objections in order to gain time and let the criminal escape. Still, they had left the constable who had driven the car standing in front of the house, and had sent Cartwright around to guard the back. So there should not be much doubt about that.

“What sorts of ways?” pursued Mr. Ramsbottom. “Give me just one instance, and then I'll try to tell you what I think about it all.”

“There's the front door,” Shelley began, but the old man quickly picked him up on that score. He cackled with unearthly glee.

“The front door I bolts and bars every night,” he said. “And bolted and barred it was when I came down just a few minutes ago to let you lads in. So you can make up your mind about that, Mr. Policeman. No burglar came into this house by the front door, last night or any other night.”

“Right,” answered Shelley briskly, cursing himself that he had suggested such a ridiculous thing. “Well, what about the back door? I suppose that a house of this size must have a back door somewhere.”

The old man cackled again. “Locked likewise,” he said. “I had a look at it, just to make sure, before I let you in just now.”

“Well, windows, then,” suggested Shelley in desperation. “There are so many ways in which he might have got in that 'twould be quicker if you would allow us to have a quick glance around than if we went through all the possibilities with you.”

“All right, then,” said Mr. Ramsbottom. “If you want to have a squint around you shall. But don't expect me to come with you. I should catch me death of cold if I went all over this old barn of a house in my nightshirt.”

“That's all right, Mr. Ramsbottom,” said Shelley with some relief. “We shall be all right. Only one thing, though: is there anyone else in the house? We don't want to go wandering into somebody's bedroom, and giving them a dreadful fright.”

Again that crazy cackle burst upon their ears.

“Eh, that's all right, lads,” said Ramsbottom. “There's nobody in the house barring myself. I've lived here all alone for nigh on twenty years, and I reckon that I shall go on living here alone until I die.”

“Right,” said Shelley, and then proceeded to split up their little party.

“You take the ground floor, Cunningham,” he said, “and keep Mr. Fairhurst with you.”

Henry had been strangely quiet during all the discussion, but at this he plainly jibbed.

“Mr. Shelley,” he said, “I think that I should be allowed to come with you.”

“Mr. Fairhurst,” answered Shelley sternly, “you will do what you are told. It's bad enough having an outsider with us at all when we're engaged on chasing such a dangerous man as this, but the least that I can do is see that you are, as far as is possible, kept out of danger.”

“But, Mr. Shelley—” Henry started to protest, but Shelley silenced him with a peremptory gesture.

“Another word, Mr. Fairhurst, and I shall tell you to go outside this house,” he said. “I've had quite enough argument in this case already. From now on I manage it in my own way.”

Henry shrugged his shoulders in mute acquiescence. There was, it seemed, nothing else to be said. Shelley had a forceful personality, and when he chose to assert himself in this way, no one—least of all, the meek and mild little Henry Fairhurst—dared to offer him any sustained opposition.

“I'm going upstairs,” Shelley announced. “If I fire this”—he held up the automatic—“I want you, Cunningham, to come upstairs as quickly as you can. It will mean that I have the man cornered.”

“What do I do?” asked Henry plaintively.

“You, Mr. Fairhurst,” announced Shelley, “stay here whatever happens. I hope that I have made that perfectly clear—
whatever happens
. Do you understand exactly what I mean?”

“Yes,” said Henry, and sighed deeply. It seemed, in spite of his ambition to become a real detective, that he was to be kept out of the way when anything really exciting was happening.

“Right,” said Shelley. “I hope that's all clear. Wish me good hunting, Cunningham. We'll have Mr. Wallace under lock and key before very long.”

“Good luck, sir,” said Cunningham, and Shelley, his automatic firmly gripped in his right hand, made his way to the staircase, which branched off the back of the entrance hall of the house.

At the top of the first flight of stairs he paused. A long corridor ran the length of the house, and there were half a dozen doors off it, any one of which might be hiding the killer. It was a ticklish job chasing a man in these conditions, but Shelley had undertaken many ticklish jobs in his time, and he was quite prepared to do his best with this one.

He opened the first door, to see an empty room, bare boards, shabby, broken walls, and a dirty ceiling. Obviously Mr. Ramsbottom, living alone in this great barracks of a house, did not attempt to use it all or to furnish all the rooms. He clearly preferred to live in a few rooms, leaving the others in this empty, untidy, dirty state.

Still, it simplified Shelley's task. Three of the six rooms on that floor were completely uninhabited in this fashion, their gloomy emptiness adding to the uncanny effect which the house seemed to be having on Shelley's mind. At no time a very sensitive man, Shelley found himself shivering as his feet woke ancient echoes on the rough boards of the third room. How many more rooms like this was he to find?

The others were different, however. The first was a bedroom—or rather, it had been a bedroom at some time in the more or less remote past. The bed, the dressing-table, the old-fashioned wash-stand, were all draped in ghost-like dust-sheets. Spiders' webs descended from the corners of the richly ornamented ceilings. The place could not have been lived in for years.

And the same applied to the next two rooms. One had once been a billiard-room, but the cushions of the ancient billiard-table were hard as bricks. The third was a drawing-room of some sort, but here again there was the same dead atmosphere.

Shivering in spite of himself, Shelley came out of the last room, retraced his footsteps to the head of the stairs, and shouted down.