Bones in the Barrow (14 page)

His voice dropped on the last word and he turned his head to look at the photograph across the room.

“So you think she went back to this shop from time to time?” David asked, presently.

“I know she did. Fairly often. And had tea somewhere around that part, too. She used to tell me the waitresses were getting to know her and how they thought she worked at the B.M.”

“Then it would be reasonable to imagine that she might have got to know someone who, perhaps, visited this tea shop as regularly as herself?”

“Yes, I think it would.”

“The waitresses who knew her ought to be a definite help,” said David. “In the meantime are you absolutely certain that none of your friends here comes under any sort of suspicion?”

“Quite certain.”

“In that case,” said David, “there isn't much point in talking to them. It would only make things rather awkward for you.”

“It certainly would,” said Alastair Hilton.

The shock he had undergone in hearing Terry's story and the discoveries of the police seemed to have broken down all his resistance. He was grateful for any forbearance, and said, in so many words, that he now feared the worst.

If that man is false, thought David, turning his car into the London road, he's the most superb actor in this country, bar none. But he did not really think Hilton was acting. The best photograph in the house was lying, wrapped up, on the seat beside him, together with a list of the names and addresses of Mrs. Hilton's chief friends and her few relations. Since none of the latter had shown even as much interest in her whereabouts as Janet Lapthorn, David wrote them off as sources of information. The friends he meant to tackle as opportunity offered. But he was determined to do this in such a way that his inquiries did not recoil on the head of the man whom he now thought of as the chief sufferer in this strangely elusive case.

Chief-Inspector Johnson, however, had none of David's scruples. Terry Byrnes was summoned, and shown a series of cabinet portraits. In these a number of glamorous, dark-haired, intense-looking heads reared themselves on necks encircled by pearls, while lightly draped shoulders faded into the bottom of the picture. Terry chose the right one, feeling confident for the first time since his original visit to the Yard. When he had gone Johnson picked up David's list of the missing woman's friends. The inspector had no scruples about anyone's feelings. He wanted to make his case.

But progress was slow. Mrs. Hilton had been careful not to compromise herself with her Boxwood friends, who turned out to be little more than acquaintances, though they had followed the modern habit of calling by the Christian name anyone whom they met for a second time. Nor did the average female intelligence of the villa world of Boxwood reach a high standard. Chief-Inspector Johnson was met with stupid coldness, stupid anger, avid but stupid curiosity, senseless malice, silly though loyal affection for Felicity; after many hours listening to inconsequent ramblings and false conclusions he began to take an exceedingly dim view of the womanhood of the district. Until at last he called at the home of Mrs. Basil Sims.

Mrs. Sims told him quite frankly that she detested Felicity Hilton and for the best of reasons.

“My husband pets her,” she said. “Oh, I don't mean literally. Basil is much too lazy ever to get mixed up in an affair. But he always talks to her as if she needed looking after, and she laps it up with those great cow eyes of hers, and you can almost hear her purr.”

She laughed aloud as she contemplated the picture of the cow-puss purring its horns off, and even Chief-Inspector Johnson smiled. “So, even though I
know
Basil doesn't care twopence for anyone except me, I am
wildly
jealous. And I've been so thankful to know she was still away, and Basil hasn't mentioned her name for months except—”

She broke off suddenly, remembering something.

“Go on,” said Johnson. “What did he say, and when?”

“I can't remember
when
, said Mrs. Sims. “But not very long ago; perhaps a month or six weeks. Basil told me he thought Alastair was going nuts as a result of living alone. I asked him what he meant. Alastair and he always go up on the business train together in the same carriage, and he'd been asking about Felicity as a matter of common politeness. ‘You needn't make an excuse for your asking,' I said. ‘We all know what a
fatherly
interest you take in Felicity.' Basil doesn't mind being teased about her a bit, which is always a good sign, don't you think, Inspector? So then I asked what happened, and he said Alastair merely repeated what he's said all along about her being with an ill friend. So then Basil said in a joking way, ‘You haven't done away with her, I suppose?' or something like that. And it was his answer that rather upset Basil, so that he wanted to tell me about it. He said he felt distinctly odd when Alastair smiled in a peculiar manner and said, perfectly seriously, ‘That would not be at all an easy thing to do.' ”

Mrs. Sims stopped abruptly, driven now by her imagination into a dark lane of horror.

“You don't think—” she said faintly. “I mean, if he's mad, he couldn't have—”

Chief-Inspector Johnson took his leave firmly, and without answering these half formulated questions. He was in a hurry to find Mr. Basil Sims. And to find him before he went home that day to hear what his wife had to tell him. Though she might telephone, of course. There was always that possibility.

Mrs. Sims had not telephoned to her husband's office. Johnson, after asking the receptionist if a message had been received from Mrs. Sims, was told, no, there had been no call from Boxwood.

“In that case,” said the inspector, “I will deliver it in person.”

Mr. Sims was affable, though clearly mystified. Any annoyance he may have felt on learning of Johnson's ruse to enter his office was admirably controlled. The inspector gave his usual guarded account of his search for Mrs. Hilton, and carefully led Basil to give his own views. To his surprise the latter said he was not a bit anxious about her. He did not describe the rather sinister conversation his wife said he had held with Hilton. Instead he explained his view that Felicity Hilton was the sort of woman who would always find someone to look after her. Alastair was so darned dull, he continued, a thoroughgoing good chap, but too dim for a woman like Felicity. And after all, she'd consoled herself before, so why not now?

“I take it you knew the lady pretty well?” said Johnson carefully. “More intimately than your wife, I mean to say?”

“Now, now,” said Sims, “don't take me up wrong. I'm a good boy, I am.”

“But Mrs. Hilton—er—confided in you?”

“Perhaps she did. Now and then. She's the sort of girl you can't help wanting to—well, protect—if you know what I mean?”

“But your protection did not go very far?”

“You should see my wife,” said Sims, very earnestly. “God help me if anything ever went too far.”

There was a short silence. Then the chief-inspector said, quite casually, “Has it ever occurred to you that Mr. Hilton, in a fit of—misplaced jealousy, shall we say—might have taken any drastic steps against Mrs. Hilton?”

“What d' you mean? Divorce?”

“No. I meant more in the nature of physical violence.”

“Not on your life! He's absolutely crazy about her.”

“That has been a motive in a great many—er—tragedies.”

“You aren't seriously suggesting that he's done away with her?”

“No. But I am seriously suggesting that she may have been done away with. For reasons of jealousy, or fear, or simply gain. By someone who knew her intimately. You have not, I take it, done away with her yourself?”

“That,” said Basil Sims, surprisingly, showing all his excellent teeth in a wide smile, “would not be at all an easy thing to do.”

“I need your co-operation,” David Wintringham told his wife.

“Oh, yes, darling. How?”

“This Hilton case. We've got to find the man Peter.”

“Can't you advertise? In the agony column. ‘Peter can learn something to his advantage—' ”

“It would hardly be to his advantage to find himself at Scotland Yard, held for questioning.”

“It wouldn't matter if he was innocent. Steve Mitchell thinks he was just a stooge, if he exists at all. Steve thinks Mrs. Hilton was simply playing him off against her husband, so as to make a better bargain over her return home. She was an old hand at this temporary elopement racket, wasn't she?”

“I think she had no idea how thoroughly viciously she was behaving.”

“Darling, don't make excuses for her. I can't bear it. I loathe the bind-weed type of woman. Tell me how I can help you.”

David explained that Hilton knew very little of his wife's expeditions to London except that she left home early in the morning, dressed in her best, and that she usually seemed to spend her time in or near the British Museum.

“Not really the sort of place one normally dresses up for,” said Jill. “But perhaps she used to meet her Peter there.”

“We don't know. What we do know is that she went to a certain health shop in the neighbourhood, where she bought small packets of dried herbs and other concoctions she believed were good for her rheumatism. I have also found out that she went in for crafts in a mild way, again with the idea of keeping her joints supple. Quite sound, and rather pathetic, when you look at the state of the finger-joints. The craft shop where she got her supplies is also near the B.M.”

“Where do I come in?” repeated Jill, patiently.

“You go into these shops to browse around and perhaps buy one or two things. You have been recommended by your friend, Mrs. Hilton. If I begin asking for her they will suspect me, or my intentions, which comes to the same thing. There is no one so respectable as the mild eccentric who owns a health store.”

“You'll have to tell me lots more about her or I shall simply make an ass of myself.”

“I'll be at your elbow. If you break the ice, I'll come in appropriately.”

“I don't expect they'll know who I mean from Adam.”

But Jill was wrong. Mrs. Hilton was known at both shops by name, and in both cases the assistants were eager to know why she had not visited them for so many months. They hoped her arthritis was not crippling her.

“She has been away,” said David, cutting into the conversation.

This remark brought no further response in either case. At the health shop, which they visited second, Jill said, following the prearranged plan, as she received her change, “There is a tea shop near here that Mrs. Hilton is rather attached to. She told me to be sure to go there. But I've stupidly forgotten to bring the slip of paper she wrote down its name on, and I didn't bother to learn it because I had it written down. You wouldn't know it, I suppose? There must be masses of tea shops about here and in New Oxford Street.”

“It wasn't in New Oxford Street,” said a second assistant, who was listening. “I remember her saying this place made better scones than she got anywhere except when she made them at home. That was when she was using our herbal tea. A turning off Russell Street I think she said, and it had a funny name, like Tea Cosy, or something.”

“I expect we'll find it,” said Jill.

The Wintringhams had to turn many corners, however, before they came upon the place they sought, and then they were uncertain, for the name was Cosy Corner, and they had passed a rival on the other side of Bloomsbury Street called the Tea Caddy. Nevertheless they went in and sat down.

“This is where you come into your own,” said David. “I leave it all to you.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Jill asked. “It's no good leaving it all to me when I haven't a clue about any of it.”

“Find out if this is the dive Mrs. Hilton raved over, and if the boy friend came here with her, and if so, what he was like.”

Jill gulped, but a brisk young waitress arriving at that moment prevented her from expressing her feelings. And the girl was so agreeable, and so obliging, that she found it quite easy to invent a recommendation from Mrs. Hilton as her reason for being there. The girl knew Mrs. Hilton by name; everyone there knew her by name, she explained. She had been a very regular customer during the whole of the previous summer and autumn.

“But we haven't seen her since last Christmas,” said the waitress bringing a second, quite unwanted, bowl of sugar to their table.

“She has been away,” said Jill carelessly.

“Away from London, do you mean?” said the girl. “Or away from home? She never seems to stay put, does she? Always on the move.”

Jill smiled, and David pressed her foot under the table, as a warning, or an encouragement; she wondered which.

“I mean to say,” went on the waitress, encouraged by Jill's expression, “three flats in six months is going it a bit, I should say. I wonder she managed to find them.”

“I know,” said Jill. “Poor things, they didn't seem to have any luck with their housing.”

The waitress, recalled to herself by a fierce glance from the pay-desk, hurried off to some patient newcomers, and David and Jill looked at each other.

“Without rousing her suspicions,” said David, “we've got to discover if she knows where those digs were.”

“Mrs. Hilton isn't likely to have told her, or not the truth, anyway. Didn't you say her husband knew she had a pet tea shop in these parts?”

“Yes. Actually, I don't think he ever bothered to look for it. But I agree she wouldn't be so careless, after all the trouble she went to in other ways, to cover her tracks.”

When the waitress came to their table again Jill said, “It's funny you should mention three flats where Mrs. Hilton lived last year. Because I've been thinking back, and I can only remember two.”