Mystery Villa E-Book

E. R. Punshon

• Herausgeber: Dean Street Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Description Con Conway, the notorious cat burglar, was not the kind of person to be scared out of his wits for nothing. So it seemed odd to Sergeant Bobby Owen, when he met Con quite by chance rushing, terrified, along a road in the Brush Hill district just before midnight. Afterwards he investigated the house where it seemed Conway had been, yet there was nothing, not a shred of evidence to suggest that swag had been hidden there or taken from there. It was a strange place, Tudor Lodge; it had an eerie atmosphere and disturbing associations. Twice Sergeant Owen returned to look it over but all he encountered was a very pretty and very frightened girl. Finally he found in the house a murdered man - murdered years ago. Yet still he could not make out why Conway had been quite so frightened - until he went to work in earnest on the job. Mystery Villa is the fourth of E.R. Punshon's acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1934 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels. This edition features a new introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans. "What is distinction? The few who achieve it step - plot or no plot - unquestioned into the first rank. We recognized it in Sherlock Holmes, and in Trent's Last Case, in The Mystery of the Villa Rose, in the Father Brown stories and in the works of Mr. E.R. Punshon we salute it every time." Dorothy L. Sayers

Leseprobe

E.R. PUNSHONMystery Villa

Con Conway, the notorious cat burglar, was not the kind of person to be scared out of his wits for nothing. So it seemed odd to Sergeant Bobby Owen, when he met Con quite by chance rushing, terrified, along a road in the Brush Hill district just before midnight. Afterwards he investigated the house where it seemed Conway had been, yet there was nothing, not a shred of evidence to suggest that swag had been hidden there or taken from there.

It was a strange place, Tudor Lodge; it had an eerie atmosphere and disturbing associations. Twice Sergeant Owen returned to look it over but all he encountered was a very pretty and very frightened girl. Finally he found in the house a murdered man – murdered years ago. Yet still he could not make out why Conway had been quite so frightened – until he went to work in earnest on the job.

Mystery Villa is the fourth of E.R. Punshon’s acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1934 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels.

INTRODUCTION

By the time of Bobby Owen’s fourth murder case, recorded in the atmospheric Mystery Villa (1934), E.R. Punshon’s police detective had been promoted in rank, owing to his performance in the extraordinary affair of the Crossword Mystery (1934), from Constable to Sergeant. Bobby Owen eventually would serve as series sleuth in 35 Punshon detective novels, published between 1933 and the year of the author’s death in 1956, having taken a highly visible place of honor in the pantheon of fictional British police detectives. Today, it must be admitted, the historical significance of Bobby Owen, and the novels in which he appears, are less known to the mystery reading public. This unmerited neglect of a one-time Golden Age critical and fan favorite should be remedied with the ongoing reissuing by Dean Street Press of the entire series of Bobby Owen detective novels.

The period between First and Second World Wars is known as the Golden Age of detective fiction. It is, for many, the great era of the amateur sleuth, when gentlemen geniuses like Lord Peter Wimsey and Philo Vance gamboled over the bloody plains of murder, nonchalantly dropping their g’s and screwing in their monocles while collaring not-quite-clever-enough crooks. However quite a number of professional policemen acted as lead detectives in long-running and extremely popular mystery series during the Golden Age. Some of the better-known ones, such as Freeman Wills Crofts’s Inspector Joseph French and GDH and Margaret Cole’s Superintendent Henry Wilson, “came of respectable, but impecunious, middle-class parents,” as Margaret Cole put it with reference to Superintendent Wilson; but others, like Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn as well as Henry Wade’s Inspector John Poole and Punshon’s Bobby Owen, sprang from altogether more privileged circumstances. Alleyn was the last of this high-end trio to appear in print, in Ngaio Marsh’s debut detective novel, A Man Lay Dead, in 1934. Inspector Poole preceded Alleyn into fictional life by five years, in The Duke of York’s Steps, while Bobby Owen just beat Alleyn to the presses, featuring first in 1933’s Information Received.

Bobby Owen differed from both Alleyn and Poole, however, in that devoted readers of Punshon’s detective series, which ran for nearly a quarter-century, were able to witness Bobby’s rise through the ranks, from a lowly Police Constable to a lofty Commander of Scotland Yard (“the word “bobby,” it should be mentioned for non-British readers, is British slang for a police officer). In this respect the fictional police detective whom Bobby Owen most resembles is a cop created by Sir Basil Thomson named Richardson, who appeared in a short-lived though well-received series of eight detective novels that debuted, like the Bobby Owen series, in 1933, and ended in 1937, upon Thomson’s death. Like Bobby Owen, Richardson commenced his fictional career as a stalwart Police Constable and rose through the ranks over the course of the series, ending up a Chief Constable in the last two books (no doubt even greater glory lay in store for Richardson, had Sir Basil not passed away in 1937). Yet there is a fellowship that the reader feels with Bobby Owen—no doubt encouraged by the author’s tendency to call him “Bobby” rather than “Owen” in the novels—which is lacking with the rather stolid series policeman created by Thomson (who was, it should be noted, former head of both Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department and the Special Branch). The reader grows to like Bobby and to follow his developing career and life with a sympathetic interest—surely a sterling testament, as Dorothy L. Sayers noted in her crime fiction reviews in the Sunday Times, to the unique humanity and charm in E.R. Punshon’s fiction writing.

It is Bobby’s sympathetic interest in others, particularly the decade’s downtrodden and dispossessed, which leads to his uncovering of the horrific deeds done in Mystery Villa. Now Sergeant Bobby Owen, B.A. (Oxon. pass degree only), he becomes intensely concerned with the fate of a reclusive elderly woman names Miss Barton, who lives alone in squalor in her old house, Tudor Lodge, located in “the sedate, desperately decorous, highly respectable, slowly decaying suburb of Brush Hill, once a favorite home of prosperous City merchants, but now so derelict it had not one single block of up-to-date miniature luxury flats to boast of, nor even so much, in all its borders, as a county council estate of dolls’ houses for workers.” Bobby’s pity is piqued when he hears about Miss Barton, causing him to reflect, in words resonating today, 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.”

Having become curious about the sudden influx of visitors to Tudor Lodge (including, it appears, a notorious cat burglar named Con Conway), Bobby proceeds to make inquiries that ultimately propel him and his mentor Superintendent Mitchell into an exceptionally lurid murder case, one with distinct literary echoes of Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and William Faulkner. In her rave review of Mystery Villa in the Sunday Times, Dorothy L. Sayers conceded that inevitably readers would discern similarity between Punshon’s Miss Barton and Dickens’s Miss Havisham, but she declared that in her view “the honours are with Mr. Punshon.” Sayers pronounced that in Mystery Villa, in contrast with Great Expectations, “we have the real thing—real solitude, real filth, real starvation of mind and body, with a real and ghastly necessity underlying the whole horrible superstructure of unreason.” She concluded that with Mystery Villa Punshon had found a “superb subject for a mystery,” and that he “handled it superbly.”

Unaccountably, Punshon’s impressive Mystery Villa was passed over by American publishers, although in Britain the novel was published by Gollancz, Punshon having earlier in the year jumped ship from Ernest Benn to this highly-reputed firm, along with two other notable British detective novelists, J.J. Connington and Dorothy L. Sayers herself. Punshon would remain with Gollancz for the rest of his life, although his American publishing record would be spottier. Mystery Villa itself was reprinted just once, in paperback by Penguin in 1950. Its reappearance after sixty-five years is a welcome event indeed.

CHAPTER ONECon Conway’s Terror

Sergeant Bobby Owen, B.A. (Oxon. pass degree only), recently promoted as a reward for what his superiors considered good work accomplished, realised abruptly that he had missed his way, and, simultaneously, that it was beginning to rain.

Both facts annoyed him; the first, because it would probably mean missing the last train from Brush Hill station to Baker Street; the second, because it might necessitate unrolling the beautifully neat, gold-mounted, brand-new, silk umbrella he had treated himself to that very day, for he knew that a plain-clothes C.I.D. man should always make a good impression, and he understood well how universally a man is judged by the umbrella he carries.

However, this last necessity was not upon him yet, for the warning rain-drops ceased as suddenly as they had begun. But there remained his doubt concerning the best way to take whereby to reach the railway station.

At Brush Hill police-station, which he had been visiting in connection with some not very important bit of routine business and had left only a few minutes ago, he had been given clear enough directions for finding his way to the railway, since the buses whereby he had journeyed down from the Yard would at this hour have ceased running for the night. But somehow he had gone astray.

By the light of a street lamp near, he made out that he was in Windsor Crescent, and was none the wiser for the knowledge, since he had no idea how Windsor Crescent stood in relation to the railway station, nor at this late hour did there seem a single soul abroad in all the sedate, desperately decorous, highly respectable, slowly decaying suburb of Brush Hill, once a favourite home of prosperous City merchants, but now so derelict it had not one single block of up-to-date miniature luxury flats to boast of, nor even so much, in all its borders, as a county council estate of dolls’ houses for workers.

Perplexed, Bobby stood at the corner of Windsor Crescent where Balmoral Grove cuts it at right angles on the way to join Osborne Terrace, and watched two cats prowl, sinister and swift and silent, across the road – but silent not for long, since, a moment later, there came from one of them a long, ear-splitting, nerve-piercing, sleep-destroying howl, a little like the product of a circular saw undergoing thumbscrew treatment in some machinist inquisition. Instinctively Bobby’s eyes went searching for the stone we have the warrant of the poet for believing it is a proper man’s first impulse to heave at any cat in sight, and then upon the silence following that fierce feline howl broke the sound of running footsteps, as there fled the length of the Crescent one who seemed driven by some dreadful fear.

Bobby stiffened to attention. It seemed to him there was a quality of terror needing investigation in those uneven, rushing, running steps whereof the sound troubled so suddenly and strangely the quiet of the suburban night. No man, he told himself, ran like that, save for bitter need.

He stood back a little into the shadow cast by the house near which he had paused. He could see now, by the dim light of the street lamps, the dim figure of the approaching runner. None pursued, it seemed, and somehow that gave an added terror and a keener poignancy to this unfollowed flight through the indifferent darkness. Nearer the fugitive came, and nearer still, still running in the same wild, panic-driven manner, and, when he was so near he was about to pass, Bobby shot out a long arm and caught him by the collar.

‘What’s up?’ he began; and then, with extreme surprise, ‘Good Lord, why it’s Con Conway.’

The startled scream the fugitive had been about to utter died away. He was a wizened shrimp of a man, undersized, pale faced, and now he hung limp in Bobby’s grasp, rather like a captured rabbit held out at arm’s length by a gypsy trapper. He was trembling violently, either with fear or from the extreme physical exertion he had been making; the perspiration was running down his cheeks, whether from terror or from effort; his breath came in great, wheezing gasps, till at last he managed to pant out:

‘Lor’ blimey, guv’nor... s’elp me, if ever I thought to be glad to meet a ruddy dick.’

‘Meaning me?’ asked Bobby.

‘Meaning you, Mr Owen, sir,’ Con Conway agreed; ‘and no offence meant, so hoping none took neither.’

‘Oh, none,’ agreed Bobby pleasantly. ‘Only I’m wondering, Conway, if you’re really so very glad to meet me, for you know you seemed in the dickens of a hurry, and I’m rather wondering why.’

‘Mr Owen, sir,’ Conway assured Bobby earnestly, ‘I was gladder to see you than ever I was to see the bookie still there after I had backed the winner at long odds.’

‘That so?’ said Bobby, with some doubt, and yet impressed by the strength and fervour of this declaration.

As he spoke he leaned his umbrella against the garden railing by which they were standing, and, still holding Con Conway with one hand, ran the other lightly over him. Conway, who knew the significance of this gesture well enough, submitted meekly, merely remarking:

‘You won’t find no tools on me, guv’nor.’

‘I didn’t much expect to,’ retorted Bobby, for Mr Conway was an expert of that species of the genus burglar known as the ‘cat’ variety, and had no need of any aid but his natural talents and his painfully acquired technique for swarming up the gutter-pipe that seemed to pass near some conveniently open window. From his own pocket Bobby produced a small electric torch, and flashed its light on the other’s knees and elbows. ‘Doing a bit of climbing lately?’ he asked, for both knees and elbows showed certain suspicious signs of dust and dirt.

‘Oh, them,’ said Conway, interested. ‘Oh, them’s where I slipped on a bit of banana-skin some bloke had thrown away, and went right down on my hands and knees. The mercy of providence,’ added Conway piously, ‘I wasn’t worse hurt; and a fair scandal, if you ask me, the way them bananna-skins is throwed about. If I ’ad my way, that’s what you Yard blokes would be looking after, instead o’ persecuting poor hard-working chaps what only wants a chance to earn their living quiet and peaceful like.’

‘We know all about the honest, hard-working side of it,’ retorted Bobby. ‘Any objection to turning your pockets out?’

‘As one gentleman to another,’ answered Conway frankly, ‘none whatever, seeing as there’s nothing in ’em.’

This statement at least proved to be true enough, for in fact they contained only a dirty handkerchief, an empty cigarette carton, an equally empty matchbox, some bits of string, and one solitary and somewhat battered penny.

‘O.K.,’ commented Bobby. ‘Any objection now to telling me what you were in such a hurry about? Old Harry himself might have been after you. What was it all about?’

‘As one gentleman to another,’ said Conway slowly, ‘it was just this – I was running to catch the train at Brush Hill station. And now,’ he added reproachfully, ‘you’ve gone and been and made me lose it.’

‘How were you going to pay your fare?’ Bobby asked.

‘Well, now, do you know, guv’nor,’ declared Conway, with a great air of surprise, ‘I hadn’t never thought of that – me being always used to my money in my pocket when I wanted it.’

‘Other people’s money,, you mean,’ retorted Bobby. ‘What made you so glad to see me, then?’

‘Why, that was just it, guv’nor. I just remembered like as I had no money to buy my ticket, and then there was you; and all in a flash I thought: “Why, there’s Mr Owen, always generous, free-handed as the day. He’ll lend me my fare all right, he will.” ’

‘Confound your impudence,’ Bobby exclaimed, half laughing in spite of himself. ‘Why not tell me what was really making you run like that?’

‘Guv’nor, I will,’ declared Conway earnestly. ‘It was all along o’ me not having only the one brown in my pocket, same as you saw, and not knowing where to get the price of a doss nowhere, and so I says to myself: “Con, my boy, run; run, my lad, that’ll keep you warm anyways.” So I run, guv’nor; and then, guv’nor, you collared me.’

‘Cheese it,’ Bobby exclaimed. ‘I suppose the fact is, you had been paying someone a visit, and got greeted with – with a cold bath, eh?’

This was a reference to a painful incident in Mr Conway’s past career when, having been discovered by two stalwart undergraduates in a bedroom where he had no obvious business, he had been obliged to submit to a sound and thorough ducking in a cold-water tank before being kicked off the premises. The last part of the proceedings he had taken in good part, and glad to get off like that, but the ducking, he still felt, had been carrying the thing too far – he might easily have died of it, pneumonia or something, and where would his thoughtless assailants have been then? Why, he had swallowed pints of the stuff as they held him down in it with brooms, and altogether it was not an experience he cared to think about or be reminded of. His tone was more than a little reproachful as he answered:

‘Now, guv’nor, Mr Owen, sir. If it had been like that, wouldn’t there be the whole lot of ’em piling after me, like, like’ – he said pathetically – ‘a ’orde of ’ungry dawgs persooing of the ’unted fawn? Now, wouldn’t there?’

That this observation was as true as it was picturesque, Bobby was obliged to admit to himself. And though he remained convinced it was something very strange indeed that had driven Conway on at such desperate speed, that had made even the meeting with one of his natural enemies, a C.I.D. man, a blessed relief, yet there was no means of making him tell. A quarrel with some colleague in roguery on whose preserve he had been trespassing, perhaps. An offer of a bribe might possibly be effective, but would be more likely to produce only some new impudent invention.

‘Cut along, then, if you won’t tell the truth,’ Bobby said. ‘Only, remember, I’ve seen you here, and, if any report comes in, it’ll be all the worse for you. We shall know, whatever happened, you were in it – and had your own reasons for keeping quiet, and then we shall know what to think.’

‘Guv’nor,’ declared Conway earnestly, ‘if you do, you’ll do me wrong. If any job was worked round this part tonight, I wasn’t in it. I won’t deny I had a turn, but there won’t be nothing said; because for why? There wasn’t nothing done; and for that I’ll take my dying oath, straight I will, guv’nor.’

There was a certain accent of sincerity in this that did impress Bobby. But he made no comment, and then, in a different tone, Conway said again:

‘Guv’nor.’

‘Well?’

‘Luck’s been dead out with me, gov’nor, ever since I come out of the big house. There’s times I almost wish as I was back. I ain’t got no more nor that one brown you seed, guv’nor. It was the Waterloo Bridge hotel for me last night, and crool cold them arches is, and hard as you never would believe if you hadn’t never tried, and as for luck – why, the night afore I did ’ave the price of a doss, and, if you’ll believe me, that was the very night the Mad Millionaire, what the papers call him and no one’s ever seen, had been along that way plastering every bench almost with his one-pound notes.’

‘Is that yarn really true?’ Bobby asked, for he had heard before of how some unknown, mysterious individual no one had ever seen would, at long, irregular intervals, deposit on the Embankment benches sealed envelopes, containing each a one-pound or ten-shilling note, and marked on the outside of the envelope: ‘For the finder.’

A similar story told how a shower of such notes had once descended on the heads of a queue of unemployed and homeless waiting for admission to a casual ward, thrown to them by some person no one had seen. Another variety was a tale of how, once or twice, in East-end streets the residents had wakened in the morning to find that during the night pound or ten-shilling notes had been thrust through the letter-boxes – unexpected but welcome manna from heaven. Bobby had been a little sceptical of the truth of these stories, but Conway assured him they were accurate enough, though he himself, such was the weight of the malignant forces for ever pressing him down, had never had the luck to be the recipient of this mysterious bounty.

‘Some say it’s a millionaire what’s being sorry for all he’s done in the past,’ Conway explained. ‘And some think it’s a parson of some kind, doing good according to his lights, what no man can’t ’elp, but what I say is, if it was that way, he would be along quick enough to rake in the souls what he’d been laying down the bait for. But some says it’s a sportsman what’s brought off something good, wanting to share his luck so as he shan’t lose it.’

‘It’s a queer yarn,’ Bobby observed. ‘What do you think yourself?’

‘It’s a looney what’ – began Conway, and then stopped so abruptly that Bobby had the idea he had intended to say more and then had changed his mind – ‘a looney what his keepers don’t look after proper,’ Conway completed his sentence, differently, as Bobby felt more certain still, from the manner first intended. ‘Guv’nor,’ he added, ‘what about the price of a doss, guv’nor, so as in your own bed to-night you won’t have to think of no poor bloke keeping them stones warm under Waterloo Bridge?’

Bobby sighed, and produced a couple of shillings, but, before handing them over, felt himself called upon – it must be remembered he was still quite young – to improve the occasion by a short but earnest homily on the advantages of hard work and honesty, and the extreme ruggedness of the path chosen by the transgressor. Conway listened with an air of meek yet absorbed attention that Bobby found distinctly pleasing, so that he really did not mind very much the loss of his two shillings as he handed them over.

‘That’ll do you bed and breakfast,’ he said. ‘Though I believe you men think we are at the Yard only for you to touch between one job and the next.’

‘Well, guv’nor,’ observed Conway thoughtfully, as he accepted the two shillings, ‘if it wasn’t for the likes of us, where would the likes of you be? Unemployed, that’s what,’ declared Conway darkly, as he melted away into the night, and not until he had vanished did Bobby discover that his smart, brand-new, gold-mounted, silk umbrella he had been so proud of had vanished, too.

At the same moment the long-threatening rain began to fall – heavily.

CHAPTER TWOTudor Lodge

Though it did not keep Bobby awake, nor trouble his slumbers with vexing dreams – for he was still of an age that knows little of sleeplessness or vexing dreams – nevertheless the memory of that strange flight of Con Conway’s through the silent and unheeding streets remained teasingly in his mind.

Something, it was certain, must have happened to drive the little man in such headlong panic, something so strange and terrifying it had actually come to him as a relief to find himself collared by a C.I.D. man. After he woke, before he got up, while he was dressing, Bobby worried himself with endless conjectures; while he was shaving he cut himself, because he was thinking about it instead of about what he was doing; so absorbed, indeed, was he that he actually forgot all about his second rasher of bacon, and allowed it to be taken away untasted – much to the alarm of his good landlady who, startled by so unprecedented an occurrence, was inclined to fear that he must be either ill or in love.

Later, Bobby made an excuse to ring up Brush Hill and inquire if any report of any unusual happening in the district had come in, explaining, as he did so, that he had seen Con Conway there the night before, and wondered if he had been up to mischief. The facetious reply came back that all was quiet on the Brush Hill front, but when, partly by chance, partly through a little manoeuvring on his own part, Bobby found himself, next afternoon, in the same district again, he took the opportunity of having a look round the scene of his odd encounter with Conway – perhaps not without a lingering hope that, with luck, he might run across Conway himself again, and so get that opportunity for which his soul yearned of a quiet little heart-to-heart chat with him about brand-new, gold-mounted, silk umbrellas.

He found Windsor Crescent easily enough, and strolled down it, and then by Osborne Terrace into Balmoral Grove. The houses all seemed much the same; large, roomy, comfortable but neglected-looking dwellings, generally detached or semi-detached, with good gardens, and nearly all with those basements that prove so conclusively by their very existence the truth of the theological doctrine of original sin and the natural perversity of man. The whole district appeared to have everywhere much the same shabby, neglected air, the same appearance of a prosperity that had passed and a poverty that had replaced it. A small proportion of the houses were vacant, many of the others showed those contrasting curtains at the different windows of the different floors that suggest occupation by different families of different tastes, and, indeed, there were a good many bills displayed proclaiming that there were to let flats described according to the fancy of agent or landlord as ‘self-contained’, ‘convenient’, ‘eligible’, ‘desirable’, ‘mansion’, or ‘family’. Gardens and fences, too, had all the same neglected air, for this was, in fact, a neighbourhood that, fifty or sixty years ago, had been a favourite with well-to-do City men, but that since then the flow of the high tide towards the flat in Town, and the ebb of the low tide towards the villa on the Surrey Downs, had left desolate. For the tubes had passed it by, the trams knew it not, the motor-buses ignored it, and this lack of convenience of access to the City and the West-end had resulted generally in tenants to whom the consequently lower rent was of importance. Agents and landlords had found themselves finally driven to recommend it as ‘quiet’ – desperate device indeed to suggest ‘quiet’, as an inducement, to a generation that adores in equal measure jazz, the motor-cycle, and the loud-speaker, and that has invented the pneumatic drill.

It was with a distinctly puzzled air that Bobby perambulated this little decaying backwater of London life.

‘Now what on earth can Con Conway have been after round here?’ he asked himself, as he hesitated whether to turn down Teck Gardens into Battenberg Prospect or to retrace his steps up Windsor Crescent, which, by the way, was no more a Crescent than Battenberg Prospect was a prospect or Balmoral Grove a grove – though probably their builder was a loyalist. ‘But I’ll bet,’ Bobby added to himself, ‘there must be something that brought Conway here – something he was after, just as something certainly happened that scared him like the devil.’

For Con Conway – no one knew for certain whether the ‘Con’ represented his first name or was merely a pleasant allusion to the numerous occasions on which he had been a convict in one or other of His Majesty’s gaols – was a man of some standing in his profession, and, as a self-respecting practitioner, was not likely to have been attracted save by the prospect of a job really worthy of his attention, such a job, and such loot, as in fact none of these ‘converted’ residences seemed very likely to offer. Several of the empty houses would no doubt yield a visitor a certain amount of plunder in the shape of brass taps and lead piping and so on, but such vulgarities were not likely to tempt a man like Conway, who dealt only in jewels or cash. Indeed, so highly specialised a business is that of crime, so water-tight are its different compartments, that Conway would most likely have had no more idea than the average honest citizen how best to dispose of such stuff as brass taps and their like, though for a diamond ring or a gold brooch he would have known at once the best available market.

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.

CHAPTER THREEThe Broken Window

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:

‘I don’t think there can be anyone there.’

‘Oh, the old party’s never out in the day; only she’ll never show,’ Wild answered, and strolled on to where a rotting fence and some tumbledown trellis-work had once screened off the garden. ‘Lummy! Come and look here. Ever seen such a sight?’

Indeed, it was a garden that seemed now more like a bit of the primeval chaos than anything else. For nearly half a century the vegetation had grown, or not grown, at its own will, and mingled with it was a confusion of empty tins, of old rags, of ashes and cinders – for dustmen had long ceased to call – of piles of rotting paper blown here by the wind and then trapped.

‘Even a dead cat,’ Wild said, pointing to one. ‘I suppose when anybody round about wants to get rid of anything, they chuck it over the fence.’