The House Opposite

by J. Jefferson Farjeon

  Published by COLLINS CRIME CLUB

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by The Crime Club Ltd for Wm Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1931

  Published by The Detective Story Club Ltd 1932

  Copyright © Estate of J. Jefferson Farjeon 1931

  Introduction © Estate of H. R. F. Keating 1985

  Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1932, 2016

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008155841

  Ebook Edition © January 2016 ISBN: 9780008155858

  Version: 2015-11-18

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Part I: Number Twenty-Nine

  Chapter I: THE CALLER

  Chapter II: CREAKS

  Chapter III: BEN ACCEPTS A JOB

  Chapter IV: AT THE COFFEE STALL

  Chapter V: THE CONTENTS OF A PARCEL

  Chapter VI: A TASTE OF DEATH

  Chapter VII: THE WILL OF A WOMAN

  Chapter VIII: BEN FINDS NEW QUARTERS

  Chapter IX: THE SEAT

  Chapter X: BACK AGAIN!

  Chapter XI: WHAT YOU CAN DO WHEN YOU MATTER

  Chapter XII: HOW NOT TO KILL AN INDIAN

  Chapter XIII: A QUEER ASSOCIATION

  Chapter XIV: BEN SEES A MURDER

  Chapter XV: BEN COMMITS A MURDER

  Chapter XVI: BEN TAKES THE PLUNGE

  Part II: Number Twenty-Six

  Chapter XVII: THE SPIDER’S PARLOUR

  Chapter XVIII: COCKTAILS IN JOWLE STREET

  Chapter XIX: MR CLITHEROE’S BIG IDEA

  Chapter XX: WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS

  Chapter XXI: LITTLE HYMNS OF HATE

  Chapter XXII: THE FRIENDLY SURFACE

  Chapter XXIII: MIDNIGHT

  Chapter XXIV: ACROSS THE ROOF

  Chapter XXV: NADINE GOES IN

  Chapter XXVI: MAHDI TAKES CONTROL

  Chapter XXVII: WHEN MORNING CAME—

  Chapter XXVIII: THE PERFORMANCE

  Chapter XXIX: THE TERMS OF SILENCE

  Chapter XXX: BEN GETS IN

  Chapter XXXI: OUTSIDE THE CELLAR DOOR

  Chapter XXXII: THE CONVERSATION IN THE HALL

  Chapter XXXIII: THE LONG WOODEN BOX

  Chapter XXXIV: INTO THE BOX

  Chapter XXXV: OUT OF THE BOX

  Chapter XXXVI: AND LIFE GOES ON

  The Detective Story Club

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  BEN, J. Jefferson Farjeon’s tramp detective, or tramp with a genius for trouble, once a decidedly popular figure, made his last appearance in print in the early 1950s and his creator died in 1955. So it is hardly surprising, though it is sad and perhaps not a little unjust, that today as one in the roll-call of fictional detectives he has almost entirely disappeared.

  But in his day, which began in the early 1930s not in a crime story but on the stage in Number Seventeen, ‘the play that made all London laugh’, Ben was a figure recognized and indeed loved up and down the land. It is easy to see why. His creator had hit on a character more than merely one-sided. Yes, Ben is a fictional device designed to open our eyes a little by showing us the world seen worm’s-eye-view. But he is more than that. He is a warm human being, embodying doubtless something of the personality of his creator, whom his sister, Eleanor Farjeon, the children’s writer, described in her book A Nursery in the Nineties as having ‘the least selfish nature of any child I have ever known’.

  Yet—a sign of the reality of a fictional character, this—Ben is unselfish and also simultaneously selfish. Selfish, that is, in a special and endearing way. He is a hedonist. He puts enjoyment very high among his priorities. When it comes to little pink cakes he always eats the icing first ‘because if you suddenly died…that was the best way of making sure of it’. And add that Ben is a bit of a philosopher, too, someone who has pondered the ways of the world and come to certain conclusions. Such as that ‘wars ’appen’. This puts him in the school of Hobbes, life seen as ‘nasty, brutish and short’. But, like the gentleman who met Samuel Johnson, with Ben cheerfulness is ‘always breaking in’ despite the ‘emergencies’ which lie in his path by the thousand.

  And J. Jefferson Farjeon deserves yet more credit than this. Not only did he create a character with a good many different sides to him (as we all have in real life) and sides which convincingly hang together despite their apparent opposition, but he also succeeded in writing about a person much lower than himself in the intellectual/social pecking order. It is by no means easy to do. Even such a skilled crime novelist as Agatha Christie came, to my mind, a fearful cropper when in Endless Night she attempted to put herself into the shoes of a young layabout. But into Ben’s shoes, and into the muddled back of his mind, his creator undoubtedly got.

  While we are about it we might as well give Mr Farjeon another couple of pats on the back. First for the way he handled Ben’s cockney speech. Again this is not an easy thing to do. If a writer uses too many phonetic transcriptions (Yer’ve, dunno, wanter) he risks making himself, and his character, unintelligible. Even the great Kipling occasionally went too far in this. On the other hand, if the writer confines himself to too few such verbal devices he risks not conveying the full flavour. Mr Farjeon, who is fairly generous with the dunnos and the wanters, got it, I think, just right, if only at times by the skin of his teeth.

  Then he deserves praise for the way he put Ben centre-stage in his book for the whole of the action. What we see and what we hear we see through Ben’s eyes, hear through his ears. This gives a novelist a tremendous grip on his readers’ sympathies, but it also often lands him in tremendous difficulties. What the other characters are thinking or feeling has to be conveyed just by what Ben sees of them. Mr Farjeon managed this with great skill, particularly in making none of it obvious. The concocter of the blurb for one of the non-Ben books who ended his piece ‘The writing is so good you never notice it at all!’ was using something less than the usual blurbistic licence.

  For Mr Farjeon’s cleverness as a contriver of suspense you must read the pages ahead. Dorothy L. Sayers said of him once that he was ‘quite unsurpassed for creepy skill’ and although in this story the element of creepiness is minimal there is certainly a good ration of suspense ahead.

  I imagine J. Jefferson Farjeon inherited this skill with the dramatic from both sides of his family. His father, Ben (and there’s a clue), brought up as one of an impoverished Jewish immigrant family in Whitechapel, eventually became a tremendously successful writer of fiction. ‘More powerful, graphic and tender,’ enthused a reviewer in 1872, ‘than any since Dickens.’ He was a magnificently larger than life character, once buying 120 soles at Billingsgate fish-market ‘because they were cheap’, a
nd returning to England as a young man from New Zealand, where he was making a good career as a journalist, on the sole strength of a letter from Dickens acknowledging a story sent to Household Words which said no more than ‘I cannot on such evidence (especially when you describe yourself as having written “hurriedly”) form any reasonably reliable opinion of your power of writing.’ His mother was the daughter of Joseph Jefferson, the American actor-manager, famous on both sides of the Atlantic for his impersonation of Rip Van Winkle in a play he put together himself from Washington Irving’s story of the man who went to sleep for twenty years and woke to find a much changed world.

  Cheerful, philosophic, good-hearted, fear-trembling Ben has been put to sleep by public neglect for rather longer than twenty years. If he wakes up now he will wake to a world very much changed in many ways from the world of the early 1950s, and even more from the world of the 1930s which was perhaps his true time. But I rather think that his way of looking at life will still amuse and perhaps, too, awaken some of the sleeping sympathies we are all cursed with.

  H. R. F. KEATING

  April 1985

  PART I

  NUMBER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER I

  THE CALLER

  ‘GAWD!’ muttered the temporary tenant of No. 29 Jowle Street. ‘That’s done it!’

  He was eating cheese. His dining-table was a soap box. His view was peeling wallpaper. And his knife, fork and spoon were eight fingers and two thumbs. Not, of course, that one needs a knife, fork and spoon for cheese. Eight fingers and a couple of thumbs are sufficient for anybody.

  Despite his primitive accessories and his faded, dilapidated view, the temporary tenant of No. 29 Jowle Street had been quite content until this moment. He had lived in more empty houses than any one else in the kingdom, and he knew a good one when he came across it. Beginning with No. 17, he had worked upwards and downwards, numerically, until his addresses had included every number under fifty. The usual method was to enter the houses slowly and to leave them quickly—and he had left the last one very quickly. But No. 29 had suggested a longer stay. Its peeling walls and rotting staircase had whispered comfortingly, ‘No one has been here for years and years, and no one will want to come here for years and years.’ This was the message of welcome one most appreciated…

  But, now, this bell!

  ‘I ’aven’t ’eard it,’ decided the diner. ‘’Cos why? It ain’t rung, see?’

  He continued with his cheese. The bell rang again. Again, the cheese halted.

  ‘Wot’s the good of ’is ringin’ like that when nothink ’appens?’ grumbled the diner. ‘If ’e’d got any sense ’e’d go away and know there was nobody ’ere.’

  The bell rang a third time. The diner concluded that Fate was not going to let him have it all his own way. When people rang thrice, you had to decide between the alternatives of letting them in or ’opping it.

  You could ’op it, in this case, through an open window at the back. It would be quite easy. On the other hand, it was a nice house and a nasty night. Sometimes boldness pays.

  The bell rang a fourth time. ‘Gawd, ain’t ’e a sticker?’ thought the diner, and decided on the policy of boldness.

  He had selected for his meal the front room on the second floor. He always liked to be high up, because it made you seem a long way off. Moreover, this was the only room in the house that was furnished. None of the other rooms had any soap boxes at all. Still, there was one disadvantage of being on the second floor. You had to go down two flights of creaking stairs to get to the ground floor, which you didn’t exactly hanker after in the evening. And then, murders generally happened on second floors.

  The temporary tenant of No. 29 Jowle Street faced the discomfort of the creaking stairs, however, because he felt he couldn’t stand hearing the bell ring a fifth time, and he felt convinced that, unless he hurried his stumps, it would. He hurried his stumps rather loudly. No harm in being a bit impressive like, was there? He even cleared his throat a little truculently. The world takes you at your own valuation, so you must see it’s more than tuppence.

  Reaching the front door, he paused, and at the risk of his impressiveness called:

  ‘’Oo’s there?’

  The bell rang a fifth time. He fumbled hastily with the latch, and threw the door open.

  He had vaguely expected an ogre or a fellow with a knife. Instead he found a pleasant-featured young man standing on the doorstep. For an instant they regarded each other fixedly. Then the pleasant-featured young man remarked:

  ‘Say, you’re a little streak of lightning, aren’t you?’

  ‘You bin ringin’?’ blinked the little streak of lightning.

  ‘Only five times,’ answered the caller. ‘Is that the necessary minimum in your country?’

  The little streak of lightning didn’t know what a necessary minimum was, but he was interested in the reference to his country. It suggested that it wasn’t the caller’s country. So did the caller’s bronzed complexion. Still, this wasn’t a moment for geography.

  ‘Wotcher want?’ asked the cockney. ‘No one lives ’ere.’

  ‘Don’t you live here?’ countered the visitor.

  ‘Oh! Me?’

  ‘Yes; you. Who are you?’

  ‘Caretaker.’

  ‘I see. You’re taking care of the house.’

  ‘Yus.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you do it better?’

  ‘Wot’s that?’

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’

  ‘Yus.’

  ‘Then why did you say “Wot’s that?”’

  ‘’Oo?’

  The visitor took a breath, and tried again.

  ‘Our conversational methods seem at some variance,’ he said; ‘but perhaps if we try to like each other a little more we may meet somewhere. When I asked why you didn’t take care of the house better I was referring to its condition. It doesn’t look as though anybody ever took care of it at all.’

  ‘It ain’t exactly Winsor Castle,’ admitted the tenant.

  ‘And then, you were the devil of a time answering the bell, weren’t you?’

  ‘P’r’aps it didn’t ring proper?’

  ‘I’m sure it rang proper!’

  ‘Well, and now I’m ’ere proper, so wotcher worryin’ abart?’

  ‘To tell the truth, old son, I’m worrying about you,’ answered the visitor. ‘Rather queer, that, isn’t it?’

  ‘If yer like.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I tole yer.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Caretaker.’

  ‘Oh, yes! So you did! But what’s your name?’

  ‘Wotcher wanter know for?’

  ‘Trot it out!’

  ‘Ben—if that ’elps.’

  ‘It helps immensely. Well, Ben—’

  ‘’Ere, gettin’ fermilyer, ain’t yer?’ demanded the cockney. ‘’Oo’s give you permishun ter call me by me fust name?’

  ‘You haven’t told me your last,’ the visitor reminded him. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Moosolini.’

  ‘Thank you. But I think I prefer Ben, if you don’t mind. How long have you been the caretaker here?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Who engaged you—?’

  ‘’Ow long ’ave I gotter stand ’ere answerin’ questions?’ retorted Ben. ‘I’m goin’ ter ask you one, fer a change. ’Oo are you? That’s fair, ain’t it?’

  ‘Who am I?’ murmured the visitor, and suddenly paused.

  ‘’E don’t want me ter know,’ reflected Ben. ‘Fishy, the pair of us!’

  The next moment he realised that there was another reason for the pause. A door had slammed across the street. The visitor had turned.

  The door that had slammed was the front door of the house opposite. The number on it was ‘26.’ For an instant Ben stared vaguely at the number, as the movement of a figure in front of it rendered it visible after a second of obscurity. A girl’s figure; she appe
ared to be leaving hurriedly. But Ben found himself less interested in the girl on the doorstep of No. 26 than in the man on the doorstep of No. 29, for the man suddenly left the doorstep and made for the pavement.

  ‘Wot’s that for?’ wondered Ben. ‘Wot’s ’e arter?’

  He appeared to be after the girl. The girl was hastening towards a corner, and the young man looked as though he were going to hasten after her.

  ‘Lummy, ’e don’t waste no time!’ thought Ben.

  But if the young man’s intention had been to follow the girl he abruptly changed it when she had turned the corner and disappeared. Instead of following her, he veered round towards the house she had just left. No. 26 Jowle Street. Ben watched him from No. 29.

  ‘Well, ’e’s fergot me, any’ow,’ reflected Ben. ‘If ’e wants me ’e’ll ’ave ter ring agin!’

  He closed the door quickly and quietly. A bang might have brought the young man back. He waited a few seconds, just to make sure that the young man wasn’t coming back again, and then began to ascend the stairs to resume his interrupted meal.

  It has been said that Ben had lived in many empty houses. He had. But he had lived in them for reasons of economy rather than of affection, and it depressed him that he had not really and truly grown to love them. Perhaps this was because he had had a bad start. His first empty house, ‘No. 17,’ had given him enough nightmares for life. But it must be admitted, and you had better know it at once, that Ben was not one of the world’s heroes, and if there was one thing he couldn’t stand it was creaks. ‘Give me the fair shivers, so they does,’ he confessed to his soul. (Ben had a soul—you had better know that, too, lest in what follows you may be tempted to be hard on him.) Yes, even in his able-bodied days he had hated the creaking of ships. Even when he had been surrounded by fellow-seamen. But all alone, in empty houses…