Mystery Villa (3 page)

Turning back, Bobby retracted his steps along Windsor Crescent, and, about half-way, paused to look again at a house that he had noticed before. With the careful, quick attention he had taught himself to give, overlooking no detail, for he knew well that strange realities may lurk behind the most ordinary appearances, he let his gaze travel over this residence that showed no notice that it was to let or to be sold, but that yet had about it an even more strongly marked air of desolation and neglect than had any of those displaying house-agents' bills.

On the gate, secured by a rusty chain and padlock that seemed to have been in position for years, was just visible, in faded paint, the name, Tudor Lodge; and as Bobby had recently read two novels about Henry VIII, and two violently contradictory lives of the same monarch, as he had also quite recently seen one film that specialised in depicting the table manners of the same historic personage, one play about him, and another about his daughter, Elizabeth, he found himself wondering vaguely if the Tudor cult was older than he had supposed. Beyond the gate was a gravel path, overgrown with weeds and grass, and the front garden had evidently not been touched for a very long time. The windows on the ground floor of the house were closely shuttered, and from the front door most of the paint had long peeled off. At most of the upper windows the blinds were drawn, and all seemed thick with the dust and dirt of years. But a gap by the side of the padlocked gate admitting to the drive showed signs of use, and the path leading to the back of the house seemed less grass-grown than the drive.

‘Perhaps there's a caretaker,' he thought idly, and he noticed that a small window at the side of the house, on the first floor, was open, and that a gutter-pipe passed close by so that, to a man like Conway, access and entry would be perfectly easy. ‘Only there wouldn't be likely to be anything there Conway would think worth taking,' Bobby told himself, as he walked away.

His watch informed him he had half an hour to spare, so he went on to the Brush Hill police-station, where he looked in, ostensibly to make a purchase at the canteen, but really for a chance of getting a talk with someone. In the billiard-room he was lucky enough to find one of the sergeants attached to that division, a man named Wild, with whom Bobby had chanced to be associated in some small case shortly before, and who now was watching a game of pool then in progress.

Sergeant Wild, a portly, dignified person, not far from retiring age, greeted Bobby with a nicely calculated mixture of the condescending patronage a veteran may justifiably show the young recruit, and of the deferential amiability due to a rising C.I.D. man whose name was already becoming known. But he did not seem very interested when he found that it was still Con Conway of whom Bobby wished to talk.

‘Most likely he was only doing a prowl round, on the lookout for any likely prospect,' declared Wild. ‘Nothing's been reported, that I know of, and I've asked some of the boys, but none of them seem to have seen him, or anyone answering to the description. Besides, there's not much in his line round about this part; it's the big stuff he goes after, as a rule.'

‘Something had scared him; scared him pretty bad, too,' Bobby insisted. ‘I can't help wondering what.'

‘Perhaps he saw one of our chaps, and thought he had better clear while the going was good,' suggested Wild, with a chuckle.

‘Maybe he's one of the football gang,' remarked one of the pool players, who had been listening while waiting for his turn, and who wanted to join in what seemed like a little gentle chaff of one of those smart Yard chaps.

‘Football? How's that?' Bobby asked.

‘Richards only means,' explained Wild, a little coldly – for he remembered that he and Bobby were both sergeants; and, while it is one thing for a sergeant of many years' experience to smile away the fancies of a sergeant of junior standing, mere constables should be more discreet – ‘that there's been complaints from the residents in Windsor Crescent, and round that neighbourhood, of boys playing football in the streets. We're badly off for open spaces in this part, and Windsor Crescent is a good, wide, open street without much traffic – only, the trouble is, soon as our backs are turned, there they are at it again. Richards – he was on the beat last week – says it's nothing to make a song about, but he's a football fan himself, and I wouldn't put it past him to join in if he thought no one was looking. I shall have to go round myself, and see what it's really like – don't want to detail a plain-clothes man unless we have to.'

‘Know anything of a deserted, neglected-looking house in Windsor Crescent – Tudor Lodge it's called, I think?' Bobby asked.

Wild nodded, and his plumb good-humoured features took on a serious expression.

‘We shall have to break in there one of these days, most likely,' he said.

A little startled by this remark, Bobby looked up sharply.

‘In what way? How do you mean?' he asked.

‘Old party lives there all alone,' Wild explained. ‘Some of these days one of the neighbours will come along and say she hasn't been seen for a week or two, and then we'll break in, and we'll find her dead in the kitchen or somewhere, and the verdict will be, “Natural death, accelerated by neglect and exposure.” I've known similar cases before, and that's the way they always end.'

‘There wouldn't be any need to break in just now,' Bobby observed. ‘I noticed one of the windows on the first floor was open, and there's a gutter-pipe runs quite close. Anyone could get in with a ladder easy enough. Conway could swarm up the gutter-pipe and be inside in less than no time.'

He spoke with a certain troubled uneasiness, for there was still a vivid picture in his mind of Conway fleeing through the streets as though driven on by some dreadful memory, and there still teased him, with the fascination an unsolved problem always possessed for him, the question of what it was had caused such extreme, strange terror. But Wild guessed what was in Bobby's thoughts, and his grave expression gave way to a slightly superior smile.

‘Nothing there worth picking up,' he pronounced. ‘Rates haven't been paid for donkey's years. Gas cut off ever since I came to this division. Water turned off by the board, and turned on again by the sanitary people, quite as a regular thing. Besides, as it happens, Turner was on that beat last night, and he's always taken a bit of interest in her, and been sorry for the old party, along of having a mother-in-law himself what's half balmy, too. And, when he came off duty this morning, he told me he had seen the old lady of Windsor Crescent and said good night to her, and she said ‘Good night, officer,' and scuttled off fast as she could. He didn't say what time it was, but it must have been after he went on duty at 2 a.m., and that was later than you saw Conway, I take it?'

‘Oh, yes,' agreed Bobby. ‘It was before midnight when I saw him.'

‘Well, then,' Wild pointed out, ‘can't have been anything to do with her that was upsetting him, or she would have said something about it to Turner – she's not too balmy for that.'

‘I was thinking, just for the moment,' Bobby confessed, ‘that Con Conway might have been up to mischief there – but, then, anyhow he's not the violent type; for one thing he wouldn't have the pluck to face an angry mouse even. How does the old lady live, do you know? She must get food and coal, and so on, somehow, mustn't she?'

‘I think I've heard she leaves an order for a small general shop round the corner by Battenberg Prospect – Humphreys, I think the name is. But I don't think they ever see her. She leaves the money with the order, and they leave the stuff at the back door, and she takes it in after they've gone.'

‘Poor old soul. It sounds rather an awful existence,' Bobby remarked, with pity in his voice, though, indeed, he knew the case was by no means rare, and that here and there in London, as in almost all big towns indeed, are strange old people, living strange, aloof, solitary lives, hermits amidst crowds, lone islands in the midst of the vast flowing tides of modern city populations. ‘Has she no friends or relations?' he asked.

‘Don't look like it,' Wild answered. ‘No one who calls ever gets an answer. You can spend all day knocking, and no notice taken. She's never seen out, except sometimes after dark, and then, if anyone speaks to her, she runs like she did from Turner. They tried to get in touch with her from the church once, but it wasn't any good – nothing to be done, if you ask me.'

Bobby did not answer. He was musing vaguely, a little confusedly, on life that might be so rich and splendid rolling on like a great river carrying with it limitless cargoes of joy and wisdom, but, instead, so often runs to waste, like the stream losing itself in the desert sands that choke it up. Was it the fault, he wondered, of life, or of the life bearer? But Bobby was too young and too healthy minded to burden his mind for long with such useless and morbid speculations, and he got to his feet.

‘I must be pushing on,' he remarked.

‘Half a tick, and I'll come with you,' Wild said. ‘I'm going your way. I've to see if there's anything in this football complaint, and turn in a report. In writing,' he added moodily, for, though he could talk as well and as long as anyone, when he sat down before a sheet of blank paper his mind was apt to go as blank as the paper.

Bobby waited accordingly till Wild was ready, and then walked with him towards Windsor Crescent where, when they turned into it, about half-way down from Battenberg Prospect, they found a busy, animated, and extremely noisy game of football in full swing, the players taking no more notice of the protests of one or two indignant residents than cup players at Wembley would of the yapping of a small dog in a neighbouring street.

‘Well, I'm blessed,' exclaimed Wild, and at the same moment the hefty youngster who was just kicking off, after a goal won and lost, caught sight of him.

‘Look out. P'leece,' he yelled.

He could not quite stop the kick he was in the act of delivering – a good kick, too, it would have been, bestowed with skill and zeal and force, that most excellent of trinities – but its aim and impulse were deflected, and, instead of sailing straight down the Crescent to where two piles of hats and coats marked the opposing goal, the ball flew to one side, over the Tudor Lodge front garden, till a crash of broken glass announced that it had found its predestined billet.

Thereon, all in a moment, as in the twinkling of an eye, as dissolves the baseless fabric of a dream, those football players had vanished as though they had never been, only a little rising dust at each end of the street left to tell that they had passed that way. After them pounded the sixteen-stone sergeant, in gallant but ineffective pursuit, much as a prize bull might chase a fleeing hare, and after him followed Bobby, running with a great appearance of zeal and a great stamping of feet, but somehow managing to get over less ground than legs so long might have been expected to cover.

At the corner where Windsor Crescent meets Osborne Terrace, Wild paused and wiped a perspiring forehead.

‘Little devils; too quick for me,' he confessed.

‘Like quicksilver, they are,' agreed Bobby; ‘here one second and gone the next.'

‘Anyway, I can run a bit still, if they hadn't had such a start,' observed Wild, with a touch of satisfaction. ‘I didn't notice you got ahead of me much, though you can give me years and weight.'

‘Took me all my time to keep up with you,' confessed Bobby, little disposed to lament, however, that now he would not be called upon to appear in court to sustain a charge of football playing in the street before a sarcastic magistrate, probably secretly sympathetic with the culprits, and inclined to regard the police as officious spoil-sports. ‘It was their start did it,' he agreed gravely.

‘That's right; a good start they had,' Wild repeated. ‘Didn't I hear broken glass?'

‘At Tudor Lodge, I think it was,' Bobby answered.

They walked back towards it, escaped, as soon as they could, two or three housewives anxious to tell their stories of disturbed rests, wakened babies, trampled gardens; promised that ‘steps would be taken' – a satisfying phrase – and then turned into Tudor Lodge, through that gap at the side of the padlocked gate by which, apparently, entrance was effected generally.

To Bobby it seemed that there strengthened, as they approached the house, the general air of dreariness and neglect that brooded upon it. Hard, indeed, to imagine such desolation giving shelter to any living creature. The rotting woodwork, the discoloured bricks, the gravel drive so overgrown with weed and grass it could hardly be distinguished from the stretch of garden – now a tangled wilderness of shrubs and trees and grass and rubbish – that it skirted, all served to heighten that impression. The windows, closed inside by wooden shutters, were broken in one or two places, and covered everywhere with the grime and dirt of years. A huge spider's web spun across the front door proved no one recently had opened it, and no sign of life showed anywhere. Only Bobby remarked, as they turned by the side of the house in search of the damage done by the erring football, that the small window above he had noticed open the time before was now closed.

‘What's the landlord thinking about, anyhow?' Bobby asked.

‘No one seems to know who the place belongs to,' Wild answered. ‘Someone told me once it was a freehold belonging to the old party herself, but I don't think that's right. Mr Howard, that's the rate collector, told me they couldn't find out, and had given up trying to get any rates paid – they didn't know who to summons, and the summonses they've issued no one's ever taken notice of. You can bang the door as long as you like, but there's never any answer.'

They came to a standstill by the window through which the football had smashed. It was that of the scullery, apparently, and it seemed that no inmate of the house, if indeed inmate there were, had taken any notice of the crash. Bobby climbed on the sill of the window, and peered within. It was an interior matching the desolation that reigned without. Ceiling, walls, furniture, everything, all thick with the accumulated dust of many years, and the door of the room sagging upon one hinge, as if in the decrepitude of extreme old age. He shouted once or twice, but got no answer. He could not see the football itself, and supposed it had rolled into a corner. He got down to the ground again, and said: