Bones in the Barrow (16 page)

He moved to a table where a silk scarf lay spread. Plucking this up by one corner he beckoned to David. Under the scarf, like a corpse under a sheet, lay the broken remains of Felicity's picture. David repressed a shiver.

“Are you sure nothing was taken from the house,” he asked. “Except the food you mentioned?”

“I have not missed anything.”

“Can we ask Mrs. Mason?”

Hilton seemed surprised.

“Yes. If you want to.”

He went to the door and called to his housekeeper. She arrived very quickly.

“Dr. Wintringham wants to know if you have found traces of the burglar anywhere except here and the kitchen?”

“In the hall cupboard, sir.”

“Oh. You didn't tell me.”

“I haven't had the opportunity. I only looked there just now.”

When you were, perhaps, trying to listen from the hall to what was going on in here, thought David. But he only said, “What is kept in the hall cupboard?”

“Nothing of any importance,” said Hilton, irritably. “Old macs, hats, gum boots, croquet mallets, and balls. Things for the garden.”

“Can we look?”

“I've not touched a thing,” said Mrs. Mason. “I left it as I found it. I was waiting till the gentleman went.”

The cupboard was in great confusion. Two mackintoshes lay on the floor of it, mixed up with several pairs of old shoes, rubber boots, gardening gloves, with the fingers in holes, an old straw hat, an old felt one.

“Anything missing?” said David.

“I really don't know.”

“Your old green hat, the tweed one, isn't there,” said Mrs. Mason.

But David was not listening to her. He had found something interesting. A few crumpled pages of the April number of
The Archaeologist
.

“Yours, I suppose?” he said, holding them out to Hilton.

“They'd be what was in the hat,” said Mrs. Mason.

“What hat?” said David.

She repeated that the tweed hat was missing.

“My old deerstalker,” said Hilton. “I sometimes stuff a bit of paper in the crown if the wind is particularly cold. But not the April number. I know I didn't use that. I haven't worn the hat for ages.”

“You had it when you went to Duckington last,” said Mrs. Mason, stubbornly.

Alastair Hilton seemed to have some difficulty with his breathing.

“Come back and sit down,” said David kindly. “I've just remembered something. The new number of
The Archaeologist
. The bookstall at the station asked me to deliver it to you. I was asking the way here.”

He went back into the hall to get the journal, where it lay beside his hat.

“You seem to have enthused your friends,” he said, returning to Hilton. “They told me a Mr. Sims takes it regularly now.”

“Basil?” said Hilton, incredulously. “Basil always makes fun of—” He stopped, peering at David as if he didn't see him quite clearly.

“You don't think it was Basil who—”

“Who came here last night?” said David, softly. “Or were you going to ask another question?”

For seven months Terry Byrnes had gone about with a load on his conscience. The cold, indigestible lump of his lie to Scotland Yard, and before that to his employer, had by this time so settled into his system that it did not impede its normal workings. Nevertheless it remained as an uneasiness, a perpetual vague discomfort. Especially was it a reproach in his relation to David Wintringham.

But for seven months Terry could not bring himself to confess his fault. It was not that, at this stage, he feared any reprisals from the office, or, which had prevented an earlier admission, any loss of faith in his story among the police. From Dr. Wintringham he learned that the Mrs. Hilton, whose photograph he was prepared to swear to, had indeed disappeared, and that there was a good deal of evidence to support the theory that she had been murdered. It was simply a question, now, of personal pride. He had gone up to dizzy heights in Cyril's estimation, and in that of his other friends who had been let into the secret. He could not bear to think of the loss of face he would suffer if he decided to put matters right at this late hour. He tried to banish the whole thing from his mind. But it would not be banished completely. And as the year advanced towards summer and the patient work at Scotland Yard continued, his guilt began to gnaw and nag at him like a relapsed gastric ulcer. He could hold out no longer. In the greatest secrecy he took his story to David Wintringham.

When he had finished telling it he wondered why he had held back for so long. Privately thinking the same, David allowed none of his annoyance with the young idiot to show on his face.

“What you are really telling me is that you must have been on a different train from the one Scotland Yard checked up with the Southern Region?”

“Yes, sir.”

“About twenty minutes earlier, should you say?”

“I don't know. I didn't notice the time till I was back in Waterloo, after walking up to the bridge. It felt like years.”

“We'll call it twenty minutes at the outside, in the frame of mind you were obviously in at the time. We must find out where your train really did have its stops, if that is possible so long after the event.”

“There are only three places it could have been,” said Terry eagerly. He longed to make amends, and had, for the last week, watched carefully from his carriage window every morning. “It could be near Nine Elms, or near Vauxhall, or it could be before either of those, on the down side of Queen's Road.”

“Queen's Road, Battersea.”

“Of course.”

David stared at the boy. Lodgings in Golders Green. Lodgings near Battersea Park. A house on the railway near Queen's Road.

“I shall have to tell Inspector Johnson,” he said. “I expect he'll want to see you himself.”

“Must you tell him right away?” said Terry, desperately. “I thought if you found the house yourself you could explain afterwards—”

“And your lapse would drop quietly out of sight in the general excitement,” said David, smiling. “As a matter of fact, we have been interested in Battersea for some time now, for two reasons, which I can't tell you about at present. I think perhaps I will just have a look round on my own. I'll let you know if I get anywhere.”

It was the handcart, tipped up against the wall under the roofed passage, that caught David's attention.

For two evenings he had driven his car in and around the borough of Battersea, following the main railway as far as possible. He had dived into side streets, and got himself involved with street markets and old bombed spaces and narrow cul-de-sacs. Gradually he had narrowed down the possible blocks of houses, supposing Terry's new ideas were the right ones. On the third night he left the car at the side of the nearest main road, where such vehicles as his were not too conspicuous, and walked slowly past the dwellings he had selected.

It would have been better, he felt, as he left the first row of these, to tell Johnson and have the professional routine turned on to this job. The Southern Region highups might have been able to pin-point the position from their knowledge of where the right train must have stopped. But he doubted very much if records were kept of the details of fog dislocation. In the earlier inquiry the drivers and signalmen would still remember what had happened that morning. But now, seven months later, their word, even if they gave it, would be open to doubt, at any rate in a court of law. All the same, David felt, Scotland Yard would consult the railway people, and they might very well suggest the most probable place for the train to slow up if the signals went against it on the outward side of Queen's Road, Battersea. And in any case the police would know straight off which houses answered Terry's description. And the borough authorities could probably help with details of the type of property, whether privately owned or belonging to the Council; whether in good repair or condemned. The latter would seem the more likely, from Terry's description.

But it was the handcart, together with his free imagination, that gave David the answer, by-passing the surer workings of the machine.

It held his attention precisely because it was a handcart. His mind was full of the known detail of Harold Rust's brief appearance. Rust, rather than Hilton, because to David, they were still apart, irreconcilably different. Rust appeared to have traded human flesh to cat owners, though not in the neighbourhood of Waterbury Street. He had on the other hand been generous to the roof-walkers at his lodging. The thought of Rust was accompanied inevitably by the thought of Rust's cart and its loathsome burden. And here was a handcart stowed under a covered passage between two houses.

David pushed open a rickety little gate in the railings that fenced the areas of the houses, and went up to the cart. It was old and dirty; it had the usual longish handles and a couple of short legs in front to support it when it was in a horizontal position. Its wheels had lost several spokes but their iron bands were sound. Having examined it, David stepped out into the road again.

It was apparent at once that neither of the two houses was occupied in the upper storeys. There were gaps in the windows, and cracks in the walls, and chimney pots were missing. It was equally obvious that the basement and lower floor of the right-hand one, being boarded up, were also empty, but that the left hand one had a tenant. A dirty red curtain hung before the basement window, and two milk bottles, one full, one empty, stood at the top of the area steps.

David stood against the area railings, elaborately lighting a cigarette. He did not know how many pairs of eyes were upon him from behind neighbouring curtains. Radios were playing an ill concerted chorus from most of the houses in the street, but though it was dusk very few lights were on. Deciding that an official bearing would become him best in that situation, he took out a notebook and began gravely jotting down in it, lifting his eyes to the roofs, touching the front doors, and making a complete pantomime of one interested in the architecture of these ruins. When he had thus examined the outside of the houses, he stepped into the passage, passed behind the handcart and, pushing open an unlocked wooden door, found himself in a small paved back yard.

It was common to the two houses, and at its further end rose the towering wall of the railway embankment. Though from the road he had seen the railway behind the buildings, David was startled to see it now so near. And also to see a railway workman, a ganger or linesman, leaning on the parapet, looking down at him.

The man made no sign of greeting: he simply stared. So David decided that he must go on with his pantomime as before. The back door of the house was stiff, but had shrunk in the dry summer weather. He could see that it was not locked. He gave the handle a violent pull, the door came open, and he passed boldly inside.

Two things were at once apparent. The house had not been used for many weeks; and it had been visited very recently.

There was dust everywhere; the thick, black, gritty, greasy dust of London. Inside the little back kitchen to which the door gave access, the dust coated the bare boards of the floor and the ancient gas stove standing in one corner. It lay in streaks in the cracked sink under the window. But the sink was wet: drops clung to its outer sides. And in the dust of the floor footsteps marked a course from the outer to an inner door, and from that again to the window. Leaving his examination of the sink for the present, David trod beside the tracks without damaging them, and went out of the door into a narrow hall.

The boarded-up front door was now before him; he saw it from the inner side, half broken, half burned, a twisted door handle still hanging from it. The footsteps went up the stairs and David followed.

He was not surprised to find himself in a room overlooking the railway. He went to the window, but he did not try to open it. Perhaps it was stiff, perhaps not. Johnson could apply all his tests later. There was nothing to see here except dust, recently disturbed.

He peered about the room. He did not want to use his torch in case the man on the railway parapet should be more curious than he seemed to be. It was dark in the house, darker than outside, of course. Even in June the sun did at last go down for a few hours. So he stood near the window in the fading light, staring about him, trying to discover the meaning of the unlocked door, the unused rooms, and the fresh footprints.

Whoever had been here had stayed some time. The marks went to and fro, up and down, blurring one another, crossing from end to end of the room, from window to door, back and forward, across and across, always ending or, perhaps, beginning, from the mean little fireplace with its rusty grate tipped up and fallen sideways. Whoever had been here had returned again and again to the fireplace. To lean on it, thinking or remembering? There was no furniture in the room. Abruptly David pulled himself together. There was another room on this floor, and one downstairs. Why was he wasting time?

He crossed the confusion of footsteps in the dust and made his way to the front room. Here he found signs of past occupation in a pile of ancient dirty blankets and torn rugs spread over one corner. There were some signs that this room had shared in the general damage to the front of the house. Behind the boards over the windows the wood of their gaping frames was charred, presumably by the same fire that had burned the front door.

It was difficult to see anything in this room and yet a torch would have sent a flicker down into the street. David stood considering. No one had come here of late. The dust was undisturbed. Yet this was a sort of resting place.

Then, why, in that other room—

He turned abruptly and went back, crossed to the fireplace, squatted beside it, peering into the chimney; he knelt at last and reached up its walls. Soot and plaster fell into the grate and a small object that rolled free of these. Shielding the light with his hand, David put on his torch and picked it up. It was a bobby pin, the kind that Jill used to have before her hair was cut short in the prevailing fashion.