Mystery Villa (16 page)

‘That's him,' said Mrs Rice.

Bobby drove on, a little to Mrs Rice's disappointment, for she had hoped to see the handcuffs clapped then and there on the young man's wrists. However, Bobby explained he wanted her to have a closer view, so as to avoid any possibility of a mistake, and would she mind calling at the house and trying to collect a year's subscription to the local parish magazine. This errand Mrs Rice, after a little persuasion, accepted, and returned successful, but slightly embarrassed by the possession of the shilling the young man had meekly yielded up to pay for the delivery of the magazine in question.

Bobby was a little puzzled by this problem, too, for he had not anticipated that such prompt success would be achieved, or achieved upon a cash basis. However, Mrs Rice had been able to confirm her identification of the young man as the one she had seen at Tudor Lodge.

‘I could swear to him anywhere,' she declared emphatically.

They were passing the church now, and Bobby noticed a clergyman, standing in the porch, and thought it would be a good opportunity to get rid of the shilling. So he stopped the car and alighted, and handed the coin to the clergyman, explaining that he had been asked to give it him as a subscription to the parish magazine for Mr Aske, of such an address.

The clergyman accepted the shilling, but looked exceedingly bewildered.

‘Very curious; very strange,' he murmured, regarding the coin with an air of blank amazement. ‘Miss Aske, Mr Aske's sister, is honorary secretary for our magazine, and receives all subscriptions – why didn't he give it to her? Besides, he's a subscriber already – nineteen times.'

‘Nineteen times?' repeated Bobby, awestruck, for, indeed, he had never heard of such a thing as one young man subscribing nineteen times to his local parish magazine.

‘I understand,' explained the clergyman, feeling that explanation was needed, ‘that Miss Aske asked her brother for a list of all his greatest friends, and then gave him a postal subscription to each one of them, as her present to him last Christmas. So it is indeed gratifying that now he should require another.'

‘Yes, isn't it?' agreed Bobby, retreating towards his car. ‘Rather... awfully jolly to have a sister like that... my word... Well, I must be off... so glad to have been any use.'

With that he ‘stepped upon the gas', as the classics say, and vanished in a cloud of dust, like one of Homer's deities when it got too hot for them too, while the clergyman still stood regarding the shilling in his hand as if it might go off bang any moment.

‘And that,' said Mrs Rice coldly, when Bobby had slowed down a little and she could hear the things he was saying to himself, ‘that is not at all the kind of language I am accustomed to.'

‘I beg your pardon,' said Bobby contritely. ‘I was only thinking aloud.'

‘Thinking, you may call it,' observed Mrs Rice, still more severely, ‘but, if so, I'll ask you to remember no gentleman ever does.'

‘Very true indeed, Mrs Rice,' agreed Bobby, much impressed. ‘Very true, and sums up at once the whole secret of England's greatness.'

Mrs Rice, flattered both by this remark and by the meekness with which her rebuke had been received, said no more, and Bobby stopped at the nearest police-station, where he arranged for his passenger to be conveyed back to London, and himself discovered, to his great content, that, by a happy coincidence, the number of Mr Aske's car was known, he having recently been summoned and fined for leaving it unattended while he bought a packet of cigarettes.

So Bobby grew very busy at the phone. All round his messages flew, and a plain-clothes man, hastily dispatched to watch outside the house Bobby and Mrs Rice had just left, reported that Mr Aske's car, N.B.G. OOX, had just started out, and was being driven Londonwards at a high speed.

Then the phoning grew fiercer still, and then began a curious chase, a ghostly immaterial pursuit that would have been impossible and inconceivable only a few years back.

Young Aske drove his car sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes he swung back upon his tracks, sometimes he shot straight ahead, occasionally he stopped dead, and then, starting again, followed an eccentric track, first towards Croydon, then back to the country, then Epsom way, and finally in the direction of Town. For that, after so many, so careful, so cunning precautions, it was still being followed, trailed, or shadowed seemed to young Mr Aske quite out of the question. He had dallied on lonely country roads, he had speeded in crowded areas, he had lurked in side-streets, and never once had he seen anything suspicious or anything to suggest that he was under observation or being followed, or, indeed, that there was any possibility of his having been tracked.

For, indeed, it did not enter his mind that every policeman he passed, dawdling indifferently down the street with nothing more to do apparently than direct old ladies on their way or inform inquisitive children of the right time, was in fact keeping a keen look-out for his car, or that, recognising its number, they made haste, the instant he had passed, to phone in a report.

To Bobby, sitting with the receiver at his ear, these reports came in quick succession. On a map spread open near, one of the local men marked with a pin the erratic course of the car, noting down, too, the time of each report, and thus, invisibly observed, immaterially tracked, was followed in ghost-like fashion young Mr Aske's car till it came to a standstill outside a block of flats. By it presently passed the policeman on the beat and opined that it was obstructing traffic. The porter protested indignantly that it was doing nothing of the sort, but agreed to fetch the owner from Flat 27, where he was visiting. Equally indignant, Mr Aske appeared; the policeman, agreeing that he had been overzealous, withdrew both his complaint and his abashed self. Mr Aske exchanged a few words of severe criticism of the force with the porter, and then returned to Flat 27; and faster and nearer, on the motorcycle with which he had been supplied, Bobby stormed along. When, presently, he arrived, the uniformed man was waiting for him round the corner.

‘Car still there,' he reported. ‘Driver in Flat 27.'

So Bobby thanked him, and, in his turn, proceeded to Flat 27.

The flats, one of those new blocks that recently have sprung up in London like mushrooms in a field after rain, were provided with all the latest improvements, from refrigerators to lifts. In a lift, therefore, Bobby ascended to the third floor, where No 27 was situated, for though, from a professional point of view, he disapproved of lifts as giving unfair facilities to the shadowee to escape the attentions of the shadower, at any rate he much preferred them to three flights of stairs.

He knocked at the door of Flat 27, and, when it opened, he was not much surprised to find confronting him the fair-haired, very pretty girl who also had opened the door for him the first time he had knocked at Tudor Lodge. He was not sure whether she knew him again, in which doubt he did less than justice to her memory for faces. She did not say anything, but she looked startled and alarmed, and still more so when he showed her his card.

‘I am sorry to trouble you,' he said, ‘but I am investigating a matter in which we think you may be able to give us some assistance.'

She was looking really frightened now, though not with that pale extremity of terror she had shown when he saw her before. As she was still silent, he went on:

‘I expect you have read in the papers that Miss Barton, who used to live at Tudor Lodge, has disappeared.'

‘But I can't tell you anything. I can't, really,' she broke out. ‘I don't know anything at all about her, or where she is.'

‘I should like to ask you a few questions, if you don't mind,' Bobby continued. ‘I think Mr Aske is here, too, isn't he?'

‘Oh, oh! How do you know that?' she stammered.

‘It is our duty in the police to know things,' he explained gravely. ‘May I ask you to be quite frank and open with us? I am sure it will be best, in the long run, for everyone.'

‘But I don't know anything,' she protested again.

He was looking at her closely, wondering very much what connection there could be between her and the strange and tragic recluse of Tudor Lodge, and what errand it was had taken her there the day when he had seen her – perhaps the first visitor the house had known since that morning when the wedding guests had assembled for the wedding that had never taken place.

‘I think it was you who opened the door to us, and gave us back a football?' he said.

She nodded a frightened admission, but still did not speak.

‘May I come in?' he asked.

She stood aside for him to enter, and he crossed the threshold into a dark little square space the flat management called ‘the lounge'. From it two or three doors opened, and she pushed one back. It admitted to a large cupboard – the flat management called it ‘spacious reception room' – already nearly crowded to suffocation by a tall, dark young man, who did not strike Bobby as particularly goodlooking, and who, observing Bobby with marked disfavour, said, addressing the girl:

‘Oh Lord, the blighters have got on to you, too!'

Bobby followed the girl into the room – to give it the courtesy title it generally received. On a small bookcase he noticed a photograph of a man in plus-fours, with a bag of golf clubs at his feet and a general air of looking down his nose that made Bobby feel certain he spoke with a pronounced Oxford drawl. He noted the fact, and stored it away in his memory, noticed, too, that there was nothing to suggest the presence of an old lady, and then Aske said again, speaking to him this time:

‘How the dickens have you managed to get here? You were out at my place just now?'

‘We have means of information,' Bobby said impressively, or so he hoped. ‘I am an officer of police–'

‘Knew that all right,' grumbled Aske. ‘Spotted that as soon as I saw the way you were staring all round, like a cod on a fishmonger's slab. And, of course, when you sent that old girl along touting for a sub to the parish magazine my kid sister messes up every month...'

Bobby deflated, so to speak. He had been feeling rather pleased with himself for having been able at last to find these two for whom the search had been so long, and till now so unsuccessful. But the parish-magazine stunt had not, he felt, been a very brilliant coup, and he decided, hurriedly, to pass it over as lightly as possible when making his report. It was partly to change the subject that he demanded abruptly:

‘Is Miss Barton here?'

‘Oh, no... oh, poor thing, I wish she was,' the girl exclaimed. ‘At least, I mean... I mean, if it was all right... Oh, I do think that you might leave her in peace now.'

‘Have you any idea where she is?' Bobby asked. ‘Or where she is likely to be?'

‘Oh, no,' she answered; and Aske echoed: ‘Not the foggiest.'

‘I didn't even know she had gone, till I saw it in the paper,' the girl added; and once more Aske echoed: ‘Same here.'

‘Didn't you also see, at the same time, a request that you should come forward and tell what you knew?' demanded Bobby severely.

‘Yes, I did, and I just wasn't going to,' retorted the girl, suddenly indignant. She looked a little like an angry fairy defying an intruding cheeky puppy dog (which is what Bobby felt like) to do his worst, and she was so evidently trying so hard to make herself appear tall and imposing that Bobby was aware of a naughty impulse to push forward a chair for her to stand on, that she might look taller still. She continued: ‘If I did know, I wouldn't tell or anything; and Mr Aske wouldn't either, would you, Mr Aske?' And this time Mr Aske's rumbling echo came back:

‘Not on your life.'

‘I've my duty to do,' Bobby observed.

‘I don't see why,' retorted the girl simply.

‘Much better chuck it,' agreed her faithful echo.

‘I don't care what she did all that long time ago, or who she did it to, either,' the girl went on. ‘It's years and years and years; and I do so hope you'll never, never find her – never!'

‘Same here,' said Mr Aske, and this time reaped the dazzling, rich reward of a grateful smile.

‘Murder has apparently been done,' Bobby reminded them. ‘At least, it looks like it – and murder is still murder, even after fifty years. It is police duty to find Miss Barton. It is your duty to give what help you can.'

‘Nothing doing,' said Mr Aske firmly.

‘Besides, we don't either of us know anything at all,' the girl added. ‘I told you so before, and it's true.'

‘Not a thing,' confirmed Mr Aske.

‘I take it you probably know why you were at Tudor Lodge, and what took you there that day I saw you,' Bobby remarked dryly. He turned sharply upon Aske: ‘You were seen in the house, too. You were carrying a pistol!'

‘I suppose that old girl of yours spotted that, did she?' Aske enquired coolly. ‘Well, sorry to disappoint, but there's nothing in it. I picked the thing up in the hall. I've got it at home now. You can have it, if you like – quite harmless; it wouldn't go off if you tried from now to doomsday, not unless it was taken to pieces, and cleaned and assembled again. The trigger's rusted in; it can't have been touched for–'

‘For forty or fifty years?' Bobby asked.

‘Well, I don't know about that,' Aske answered, more soberly.

‘You should have handed it to us,' Bobby said, severe again, and then turned once more to the girl. ‘I think it would be best if you were quite frank about what you know,' he said. ‘I'm afraid it's bound to come out. You'll have to tell, in the long run, and I don't think you need be afraid of what will happen to Miss Barton. I don't suppose anyone will want to press the case, but it has got to be cleared up.'