Bones in the Barrow (17 page)

It was enough. Johnson must take over from here. David went quickly downstairs and back through the kitchen. He would have liked to turn the tap at the sink to see if the water was running, but he refrained. He might wash away valuable evidence. Besides, the wetness there told him all he wanted to know. The tap had been used recently, whether the water was still on or not. It was not always difficult to manipulate the company's stopcock. Very often it was under a small cover near the area railings, or in the area itself. It would be easy to lift the cover, turn the cock with a spanner, and replace the cover in a matter of seconds. He determined to look for the cover as he went out.

If only it had not been so long since Terry saw murder done in this house. If this were the house. If only the boy had not been such a fool at the start. And then he softened to the thought of his confusion and distress. At that age he would most likely have done exactly the same thing himself.

Thinking of all this as he closed the back door behind him and slipped quietly into the passageway, he paused for a moment to light another cigarette, turning towards the wall to shield the flame of his lighter from the wind. It occurred to him, standing there, that the wooden door into the yard must have been put in after the disaster that had wrecked these houses. Otherwise it would have burned as the windows and doors had burned. He was still looking at the yard door when a voice behind him said, “Back again, are yer?”

David wheeled round and at first saw no one. The street was empty beyond the narrow passage. But as he stared he saw hands grasping the railings to the right of him, and a shaggy grey mop of hair above a lined, bearded face that looked at him from between the hands. The man next door had mounted his area steps; or rather stood part of the way up them; no doubt to reach for the bottle of milk that stood on the pavement at the top.

When David turned, this apparition repeated his question, but as the former went towards him, the light from the street falling on his face, the man started, withdrew the hand that had grasped the milk bottle, and began to clamber back the way he had come.

“No offence, guv, no offence,” he muttered, wrenching at his door in the area. “Forget it, mate. Me eyesight's not wot it were.”

David ran quickly down the area steps before the man was well inside his door. He thrust a foot into the opening.

“Don't be frightened,” he said, seeing the look of terror in the old man's eyes. “I won't hurt you. I just want you to answer my questions. Who did you think I was just now when you saw my back in the passage up there?”

“Copper, ain't yer?” said the old man, still more suspicious.

“No. Actually, I'm a doctor, but sometimes I do other jobs. Like this one.”

“Sanitary, or something of that? Then let me tell you it's 'igh time this place was demolished or shut up. Living like pigs, we are, and they won't turn a hair for us unless there's a eviction order. Re-' ousing. It's a farce. I'm telling yer.”

“Who did you think I was?” David asked again. He opened his wallet and took out a ten-shilling note. “I'm quite willing to buy your information.”

His candour might have been fatal, but he had summed up the old man and deliberately took the risk. He was not disappointed.

“Garn!” The old eyes looked up at him with a rather shrinking cunning. “All that about a doctor! Think I didn't see frough yer at the start? You'd better be on the level,” he went on, trying to regain control of his door. “No cosh tricks, mind.”

“Come on,” said David, patiently. “I've bought it. Let's have it.”

“Come inside,” said the old man, making up his mind suddenly. “No use making a broadcast of it.”

David followed him into a dark and filthy little room, stuffed with old furniture and as dusty as the empty house next door. He did not fancy any of the greasy chairs and remained standing, but the old man sat down near the window.

“I don't know oo 'e was,” he began. “I only saw 'im a couple of times. For why? ' Cos I was away, see, at me married sister's. Essex. That was wot made me let ' im 'ave it, see?”

“Have what?” asked David, guessing the answer.

“Me barrer. It was like this. I come ‘ome one night last winter, and there was this chap, standing in the passage like 'e was waiting for something. ‘Excuse me,' I says, not liking to push past. 'E watches me up-end the barrer and put the chain and padlock on the wheel and then 'e says, ‘I suppose you wouldn't ' ire it for a couple a weeks?' Well, I'd arranged to go to me married sister in Essex for a bit to keep out of the fog that time of year, November, you understand. So I says, ‘You mean you'll pay me for the use of it?' And 'e says, ‘Sure.' Like in a film, only ' e were English, not American.”

“No accent at all?”

“Spoke just like you, sir.”

David was not flattered, but he was encouraged to go on. With a question here and there to keep things going, he was soon in possession of a most peculiar tale.

The stranger had borrowed the handcart for the princely sum of ten shillings a week, four weeks' hire being paid on the nail. It was this that clinched the bargain. Old Harding did not have to dip into his savings, he explained, for his railway fare to Essex. He had never seen the man before, and though he was well dressed and prosperous-looking by Harding's standards, the old man had a shrewd suspicion that he had been sheltering—you could not call it living—in the deserted house next door, for the last twenty-four hours at least. But he had thought it as well not to voice his suspicions. He had gone off to his sister and stayed away two months. When he came back the handcart was in its old place; he never saw the man again.

“Then you didn't get the other month's hire?” asked David.

Harding gave him a sly look.

“Never expected it.”

“Weren't you afraid you'd never see the cart again?”

“It did cross me mind. But it warn't worth the two quid 'e give me. And I'd always a bin able to lay me 'and on another.”

“But going away, where you couldn't have known what was happening to the cart! I mean, what was he using it for?”

Again Harding narrowed his eyes in an expression of deepest guile.

“It suited ' is book to 'ave the barrer,” he said, “and it suited mine to be well shut of it. And I won't say no more'n that. Let by-gorns be by-gorns.”

There was a pause.

“What do you usually use the barrow for?” asked David.

“Rag and bones. But trade's bin bad this twelvemonth.”

David looked at him thoughtfully. Bones. Rags.

“Did you collect anything of that sort from this man who took your cart?”

Harding answered at once; too readily, perhaps, David thought. Almost as if he had prepared himself for that very question.

“No. I only saw 'im twice. When ' e come out the passage in the fog night before, and next morning when 'e was there, looking the barrer over. It's my belief if I ' adn't gorn up when I did, 'e'd ' ave pinched it.”

“In spite of the padlock you said you had on it. By the way, I don't see one on it now.”

“No. ' E must 'ave mislaid the lock,” said Harding, unblushingly. David let this pass.

“So you think he might have stolen it, given the chance. Very likely. You say you saw him the night before?”

“That's why I come to the conclusion, like, 'e spent the night in next door. Rare fog, it were, that night. I never put me 'ead out after midday, but the once. Aboutten, that were. Didn't 'ear nothing of ' im, I must say.”

“Then you wouldn't know if there was anyone with him? You didn't hear any voices, if not that night, then the next morning?”

Harding shook his head.

“I sleeps 'eavy,” he said. “An' I sleeps late, as a rule. There were nothing to rouse up for that day. I lay in all morning. Good for the lungs, eh?”

David could get no more out of him, but it was enough. This, as he had told himself before, was where Johnson must turn on the machine.

As he walked away in the direction of his parked car David glanced back. No one had drawn the curtains yet, and nearly all the windows were open to the cooling night air. The confusion of wireless programmes and television competed with hoarse human voices bawling above the din. The ruined houses he had just left stood silent in the midst of this babel. Their boarded windows made a blank space between the lights on either side. There was nothing now to draw attention to the old tragedy of their first ruin, and nothing at all to suggest a later horror.

It was barely ten o'clock when David left the scene of his latest, discoveries, and not half-past ten when he arrived at Scotland Yard. Johnson was off duty and had gone home, but he was soon at the other end of the line.

“Do you mean to say you let this old chap Harding know you were up to something, and then walked out and left him with a perfectly free hand?”

“Free to do what?”

“Muck about in the house next door to his heart's content. Warn any of his shady friends who may have been mixed up with this house. Half a dozen things he could be doing. Didn't you say this place was unlocked? Which wants looking into for a start.”

“He struck me as cunning and a bit of a twister, perhaps, but not criminal.”

The inspector made an explosive noise at the other end of the line.

“I wish I'd known you were going down there. I'd have gone with you.”

“Then we shouldn't have got anything. At least we shouldn't have got anything from old Harding. It was only his mistaking me for—someone else—that surprised him into talking.”

“Did he tell you his name was Harding?1”

“Yes. Why?”

“The name is familiar. I'll have to go down there straight away. Who's with you now?”

David handed over the receiver, and stood by while the work was organized. He came back on the line before Johnson rang off.

“Can I join you in Battersea?”

“Better not. We shall attract enough attention as it is.”

“You don't think of waiting until the morning?”

“And let your old man next door have another twelve hours to destroy evidence? Not likely.”

“I don't think he could do much harm. There was definitely something hidden in the chimney, and someone had been to remove it. I think I know what it was, and I expect you do, too. Assuming, of course, that this is the right house at last, and that the man who borrowed the handcart was Rust. I don't know why he came back, or why he should want to disturb something so well hidden, especially as we have hitherto not traced the house. But he must have had an urgent reason to behave as he has. Perhaps you will find more in the chimney than the bobby pin I pulled down. I will leave this exhibit here at Scotland Yard for you.”

David went home. If Steve Mitchell had been at the Yard he would have persuaded Johnson to take him along to the ruined house, but the superintendent had left some hours before at the end of a normal day's work. So there was nothing to be done.

Jill was still up when he reached home. She listened to his news and at the end of it made much the same criticism as Johnson had done.

“Do you think I ought to have whistled for the copper on the beat, and asked him why the hell he hadn't noticed the back door was unlocked, and told him I had just been trespassing in the bombed house and why? He'd have called an ambulance to take me to the loony bin.”

“I think you might have gone to a public telephone and rung up Inspector Johnson.”

“And then gone and sat on the area steps for a couple of hours, loitering with intent; or in the car, equally suspicious? That isn't the kind of neighbourhood where you can be eccentric without attracting attention.”

“I suppose not. If they decide that a crime was committed in that house, and it could have been Terry's crime, how does that help things on?”

“Taken with Harding's description of the man who hired his barrow, it helps a lot. It is the first likely clue to Harold Rust that has come in so far. Johnson will have to trace the barrow and the man to Waterbury Street if he can, or at any rate trace some connection between them. I'm prepared to learn there is something fishy about old Harding, but his exclamation when he saw my back was spontaneous and genuine; I'd swear to that.”

“So we only have to find a man with your back view, and we can call him Rust, whatever he says his name is,” suggested Jill hopefully.

“Yes, my darling. You put these things so well. It is exactly as easy as that.”

“There must be thousands,” went on Jill, dreamily.

“Thousands of what?”

“Back views about like yours.”

“Thanks, enormously.”

“How tall is Mr. Hilton?”

“A bit shorter than me.”

“And build?”

“Oh, yes, he'd do. As you say, there must be thousands. That friend of his, Sims. He'd do. The housekeeper.… No. I jib at male impersonation. Who else have I seen at Boxwood? A couple of tradespeople. The porter at the station. The newsagent's boy. No. He was definitely shorter, and very much thinner.”

“You'd better go down again, and check yourself up on everyone you see.”

“But Peter—it is easier to call him Peter—need not necessarily be a Boxwood acquaintance. He has to know Hilton, but not necessarily at his home.”

“I thought after the burglary you decided he did come from Boxwood.”

“Johnson did. I kept an open mind.”

Jill was silent for a time. At last she said, “If it was the poor thing's head that was stuffed up the chimney, why didn't he leave it there? Without the fresh footmarks you would not have suspected the house.”

“From Terry's story I would.”

“Oh, yes, Terry's story. But that's one of the things the murderer can't possibly know. He must think the house is beyond suspicion. So why can't he leave well alone?”