Mystery Villa (11 page)

She had been a spectator, for instance, from her vantage post at her window, of Bobby's brief encounter with Humphreys' assistant making one of his regular bi-weekly calls with the bread, the tea, the tinned milk that, with occasional matches and candles, seemed to have been all Miss Barton had needed during her long years of solitude.

Mrs Rice had not seen Miss Barton for some days, but there was nothing unusual in that – often a week or more would pass without any glimpse of her, and then the little worn old woman would be seen again, slipping, like the shadow she almost seemed, up or down the Tudor Lodge drive on one of her rare excursions into the outer world.

‘One had only to say a good night to her,' declared Mrs Rice, somewhat resentfully, ‘and she would be off like a mouse bolting back into its hole when it sees a cat – and there didn't seem much more to her than a mouse either. A good meal, and plenty of them, was what she wanted, but what could you do when she scuttled away the moment anyone spoke?'

‘Nothing,' Bobby agreed, and when he asked what Miss Barton generally wore, the answer so interested him that he went upstairs and brought down the worn seal-skin coat and old black frock and other things that had been lying by the side of the Saratoga trunk.

Mrs Rice identified them instantly, recognising, especially, the worn seal-skin, and an old-fashioned bonnet, with strings, that had formed part of the pile.

‘Well, now,' she exclaimed, handling this last item. ‘Never once have I seen her not wearing that – I used to say she went to bed in it, and I daresay she did, too; and my hubby said once – when he caught sight of her for a minute, slipping along up the garden path to the house, just like a leaf the wind was blowing – that someone ought to give her a good price for it, so it could be put in the London Museum along with the other funny things people used to wear,' said Mrs Rice, proudly conscious of her own quite up-to-date attire, with a butterfly bow of which the ends could almost have met behind her back, bare arms except for gloves whereof the gauntlets nearly reached the elbow's, stockingless legs, and a hat like a saucer perched insecurely on a head cropped like a convict's.

‘And the seal-skin coat,' Bobby asked; ‘you can swear to that, too?'

Mrs Rice could, So, she supposed, could everyone else who had ever seen Miss Barton. The quaint old bonnet and that seal-skin worn nearly smooth were not things anyone could forget once they had been seen.

‘Well, she doesn't seem to be in the house now,' Bobby remarked; ‘so she must have got a new outfit before she went out.'

Mrs Rice fairly giggled at the idea of Miss Barton in a new outfit. It seemed so funny somehow. However, there were Miss Barton's clothes, and no Miss Barton, so evidently she must have changed her attire – a point Bobby thought of interest.

But now Mrs Rice went on to tell an interesting story of how she had seen a stranger looking at the house a few days ago – she couldn't be sure when, she was one of those persons always a little vague about dates, but she thought more than a week ago, though it might not have been as long as that, or, again, it might have been longer still. She had noticed, specially, that he was wearing plus-fours, a form of garment much favoured by Mr Rice when at home, and one in which a gentleman always looked a gentleman, provided, of course, he had the legs for it. But for his plus-fours suit she would have thought the stranger an enterprising house agent on the look-out for possible business – house agents sometimes came to try to get Tudor Lodge on their books for selling or letting – or even a man delivering circulars, little they cared whether they pushed their circulars into an occupied or unoccupied house. The plus-fours suit, attire seldom seen in Brush Hill except on Sundays and holidays, and the way in which its wearer had hung about staring up at the house as if specially interested in it, had attracted Mrs Rice's attention so much that she had watched him for some time. Unfortunately he had been wearing a peaked cap, pulled well down over his face, and she had not been able to see his features very plainly, and could give little description of them, or, indeed, of him, except, always, for his suit of plus-fours in well-cut tweed. Unfortunately, too, a smell of burning from her kitchen across the landing had summoned her post haste to attend to the cake she had in the gas-oven there. When she returned – the cake, fortunately, little the worse – the plus-fours stranger was still there, indeed, but in the act of departing. Mrs Rice had watched him cross the street towards Osborne Terrace, and immediately afterwards she had also seen Miss Barton come slipping out from the side door in her usual silent, ghost-like fashion, almost as though she were following the plus-fours stranger.

Mrs Rice had not seen the stranger again. She could not say for certain whether or no she had noticed Miss Barton on any later occasion, but was quite clear she had never once seen her except wearing the seal-skin coat and the bonnet Bobby had just displayed.

‘If I had seen her in anything else,' declared Mrs Rice, ‘I should have thought the end of the world had come.'

Nor had she seen any other stranger near the house, but, obviously, others might have been without her knowledge.

‘I'm not like some,' Mrs Rice explained, a little proudly. ‘I'm not at my window all day long, just staring. Of course,' she added with perfect justice, ‘no one can help seeing what's going on before their own eyes.'

Bobby agreed that that was indeed impossible, and, in reply to other questions, found that Mrs Rice had been an interesting spectator of the arrival of the girl who had opened the door once to himself and to Wild. Mrs Rice had observed every detail of that interview, and also had watched, earlier, the girl's arrival, had noticed that she seemed nervous and had hesitated a good deal, apparently, and not unnaturally, disliking the deserted and gloomy appearance of the house. Finally, she had gone round to the side door, which had immediately been opened for her, before she had time to knock even, exactly as though she had not only been expected, but watched and waited for. The description Mrs Rice gave of her, and especially of her clothing, was extremely good and clear – a fact of some importance, since it suggested that her description of the young man of the pistol whom she said she had seen would be equally accurate, and that her account of his tie, for example, was probably as exact as her exhaustive tally of the girl's frock and accessories.

‘A smart little three-piece,' she said, adding loving detail: ‘and all to match – bag, scarf, and gloves – all very smart; she looked a real tip-topper, and might have stepped straight, that very minute, from behind the counter of one of the big West-end shops.'

To her story of the young man with the pistol she had nothing to add, but there could be no doubt of its having been actually, and in fact, a small revolver that he had in his hand, for on that point, as on others, she was clear and precise.

Apart from these three visitors, however, and, of course, excluding Bobby himself and Sergeant Wild, and various routine callers, such as the occasional postman delivering an ‘or occupier' circular, the bill distributor, too tired and indifferent to care whether he deposited at an inhabited or uninhabited house his announcements of the ‘unparalleled, unrepeatable sacrifices' some drapery firm was making in its altruism, or Humphreys or his assistant making their usual delivery calls, and so on, Mrs Rice had seen no one. Nor could she remember having seen Miss Barton since the day of the visit of the plus-fours stranger, or even, since then, any light at any of the windows of Tudor Lodge. But she added, spontaneously, that Miss Barton was so small and slight and shrunken her comings and goings were hardly more noticeable than those of a withered leaf blowing to and fro along the drive. Then, too, it was often dusk when she made her rare appearances outside the house, but it was very unusual for no flickering candle-light to show during the evening at one window or another.

In answer to a final question Bobby asked, Mrs Rice declared, with emphasis, that she would certainly be able to recognise again both the pretty girl of the smart ‘three-piece' and also the young man of the revolver. But the stranger in plus-fours she had only had a glimpse of, and that, too, at a moment when the daylight was failing. She admitted, reluctantly, that she hardly thought she could be sure of knowing him again; and then they heard the sound of an approaching car, heralding the arrival of Superintendent Mitchell and his assistants.

It was not only one car that arrived, but two, and the already simmering excitement of the neighbourhood rose to boiling-pitch when from the first car there descended Superintendent Mitchell, a doctor, and Inspector Ferris, and from the second car a photographer, finger-print expert, and two C.I.D. men, together with Sergeant Wild, for whom they had called at the Brush Hill police-station. True, of these, only Sergeant Wild was in uniform, but this sudden irruption in his company of all these official looking persons, mostly ‘out-size', presented no difficulty of interpretation to the Windsor Crescent onlookers.

The cars had drawn up exactly in front of Tudor Lodge. One chauffeur remained on guard at the entrance to the drive, in order to keep in check the rapidly growing crowd. The other was stationed at the front door, to act there as a second line of defence. The rest of the party entered the hall, where Bobby was waiting with Mrs Rice, who by now was enjoying herself as thoroughly as the artist watching a crowd before his Academy picture, as the author surveying a special ‘window display' of his new book, as the actor acknowledging yet another call before the curtain.

Bobby introduced her to Mitchell, who, without her quite understanding how, cut short the long and detailed story she was preparing to tell, got the gist of it out of her by two or three well-directed questions and then disposed of her by instructing one of the C.I.D. men to take her statement in full.

‘In full, mind,' said Mitchell, firmly, to the C.I.D. man. ‘I'm sure Mrs Rice realises how important it is she should mention every detail, no matter how small and unimportant she may think it, and how necessary it is to get it down in writing before anything's forgotten.'

Slightly bewildered, a good deal flattered, a little wistful as she gradually realised that she was thus missing the opportunity she had been looking forward to of seeing all over mysterious Tudor Lodge, which she understood was about to be searched again from top to bottom in case Miss Barton were still there, only somehow, somewhere, concealed – for as yet, of course, Mrs Rice knew nothing of the dark discovery made – she found herself escorted back to her own domain (‘can't ask a lady to stop around in all this dust and dirt,' explained the C.I.D. man amiably), and there was torn between the joy and interest of delivering a monologue to an attentive young man, who took it all down in shorthand, and her intense longing to know what was going on in Tudor Lodge, and what, indeed, as she comprehensively phrased it, ‘everything was all about'.

‘And now that good lady's out of the way,' Mitchell had said, with a sigh of relief, as he saw her shepherded safely back to her own quarters, ‘carry on, Owen'.

In succession Bobby showed the dining-room with its strangely pathetic, strangely dreadful wedding feast that for half a century or so had waited the guest3 that never came, the drawing-room where the little brown heaps of dust were all that remained to tell of the flowers that on that day so long ago must have made it a bower of beauty and sweet scent, and then upstairs, while the dust rose up in clouds and the moths flickered to and fro and the spiders scuttled on the walls, to the room where stood the Saratoga trunk with its grisly occupant – the shrivelled shrunken casket of what once had held the spirit of a man.

‘What do you make of that, doctor?' Mitchell asked, as they stood clustered in silence around the trunk, of which Bobby had lifted the heavy lid.

‘Never seen anything like it,' the doctor answered, unconsciously echoing Sergeant Wild. ‘That bullet wound in the head shows how the poor devil was killed, but I don't quite know how to account for the mummified condition of the body – not off-hand.'

‘Shall you be able to say how long the body's been like that?'

‘Not much nearer than “many years,” I don't suppose,' the doctor answered. ‘Quite outside my experience, though perhaps a closer examination may show something. Don't altogether see why the body should have gone that way. It might be due to the heavy lid shutting out all air – that Saratoga trunk is practically airtight – and then, if the room's been used for living in, with a fire and all that, the atmosphere would be drier than elsewhere; possibly there's been a kind of drying effect. Curious, though. Quite possibly there's some other cause been operating. I can't say for certain as yet.' He paused and turned to Owen. ‘Do you say an old woman has been living here in this room with – with That?' he asked, nodding towards the poor shrivelled remnant of humanity they had now extracted from the trunk and laid as decently as they could upon the floor.

‘It looks like it, sir,' Bobby answered; and for a little they were all silent, trying to realise what that lonely life must have been, dragged on through all the passing years with such a secret for companion by day and by night.

‘Never seen anything like it,' the doctor repeated; and then: ‘That room downstairs with the tables laid out, and a wedding-cake and all – was this the chap?'

‘Looks as if it might be that way,' agreed Mitchell. ‘Looks as if everything was got ready, and, when he never came, there they were all waiting and wondering and whispering – and only she knew why, she and the Saratoga trunk. And, when they had all gone, she must have come up here all alone, for she wouldn't dare let anyone else in the room, and ever since –'