The information sought came to Bobby at last neither from policeman nor postman, from barmaid nor milkman, but from an old lady keeping a small general shop, when Bobby was on the point of turning back, for the road he was following seemed as interminable as uninteresting. It had passed through the area of the semi-detached into that of the council houses and now had reached that of the scattered bungalows. This small general shop seemed almost the last sign of life the road had to show, for this was the quiet hour when the children are called in from play and the fathers are not yet back from work.
Ostensibly he had entered the shop to ask about the bus services, and by now indeed he was very willing to get a lift back if one was available. Infrequent and irregular was the bus service, the old lady informed him, and never waited for a body, not they. Bobby sympathised, bought some cigarettes as a ‘quid’ of cash for a ‘quo’ of news, and then went on to repeat his inquiry for the tall, thin man who liked occasionally to display his pictures and to talk about them.
“I’ve been to see them,” the old lady said proudly. “It’s Mr. Hands you mean. Lovely they are, too, you couldn’t ever tell them from what they have up in London at the big Galleries, though Mr. Hands says those that know could as easy as you like, and not having to traipse all that way either. It’s the house at the end of the first turning you come to on your left straight on.”
CHAPTER XXXV
ANCIENT HOUSE FOUND
NOT MORE THAN two or three hundred yards further on towards the river, for the road he had been following was now heading north, Bobby came to the turning he had been told of.
It was marked ‘Bungalow Row. No Thoroughfare for Wheeled Vehicles. Footpath only to River’. On either side stood bungalows that looked as if they had been designed for tenants or purchasers more prosperous than the present occupiers—a district indeed that had gone to seed before ever it had blossomed. At the further end stood an ancient, solitary house a little like a sentinel on watch to see no wheeled vehicle tried to pass that way. It was a tall and narrow building in three stories, the upper part of weather-beaten board, a later addition probably. In each of the two upper stories a window was bricked up, presumably to avoid the old window tax. The door, narrow, without either knocker, bell or letter-box, was oddly placed, very much to one side, so giving a queer, lop-sided impression. Near by stood the garage, its door open, so that Bobby could see that it held no car, only such a medley of petrol cans, tins, paint pots, tools, of indeed all those odds and ends that garages attract by nature. The garden, long and narrow, so that the house stood far back, was weedy and neglected, and in it grew two or three old apple trees that bore no fruit and seemed as though they never had or would. A big black cat lay stretched out in the space between the house and garage, and there was a huge water butt into which rain drained from the shingle roof—and then apparently leaked out again, to judge from the puddle surrounding it. Nine chimney pots, Bobby counted, and that he supposed meant nine rooms, more than he would have expected.
A strange-looking place, Bobby thought, and, as he perceived with disappointment, one that bore no least resemblance to the drawing in the missing Jasmine’s sketch book, the one that on him had made so strong and ominous an impression.
A gate in the tumble-down fence around house and garden, a gate that had long ago ceased to function, admitted Bobby to the garden. He started to walk up the muddy track that led to house and garage. The big black cat roused itself to survey him with evident hostility and then walked slowly away round the house, malice and contempt in every feline movement.
“Gone to warn them I’m here,” Bobby thought absurdly.
To Bobby’s knock, made with his clenched fist, there came no response. Nor when he knocked again and yet once more. He was beginning to think there could be no one there, since he thought he had knocked loudly enough to rouse the whole neighbourhood when he became aware that a woman—who evidently had been roused—had come out of the nearest bungalow and was waving to him. Apparently she was directing him to go round to the back. He did so and thus discovered, much to his surprise, that, he had now arrived at the front of the house and that the door he had been hammering at was only the back entrance.
Evidently when the house had been erected, it had faced north towards the river, overlooking what must then have been an expanse of unoccupied, uncultivated land, crossed only by the footpath that to-day was apparently in little use. The road Bobby had followed had been made later, leaving this old house to one side, ignoring it, as if realizing that in its solitude it had no part in the life of a district becoming so much more populous.
But for the moment all that Bobby could do was to stand still and stare, uttering at the same time a loud exclamation of astonishment. For this, beyond all doubt, was the original of Jasmine’s drawing which somehow, with that strange insight and power that came to him at times, he had managed to invest with such significance as though in line and light and colour he could express so much of the human situation—in the drawing Bobby remembered so well, the problem of how good and evil could exist together, rooted in the same soil. And very clearly remembered, too, the drawing on the next page, that of Jasmine himself, dead upon a bier with a tall candle burning at either end. Bobby heard himself saying, half aloud:
“The end of it all? Was it for Jasmine, too?”
At any rate here was evidently the explanation of what had puzzled, and even worried, Bobby so much—the entire failure of the drawing he had made, or of the reproductions he had had circulated so widely, to elicit any response. Probably hardly anyone but its own inhabitants had ever had so much as a glimpse of the house front. Once seen indeed it would certainly have been clearly remembered and instantly recognized. A relief in a way, for Bobby had begun to fear either that his own drawing, made entirely from memory, bore no likeness to the original, or else that Jasmine’s sketch had no foundation other than his own drug-inspired imagination.
Fortunately this door at least was provided with a knocker, a bell, and a letter-box—though the knocker was rusty; the bell, an old-fashioned bell-pull, hung awry; the letter-box stiff with disuse. But Bobby made good use of the knocker, tugged at the bell till it hung loose with a yard to two of rusty wire dependant from it, and finally prised open the flap of the letter-box to bellow through the opening:
“Is anyone there?”
This produced results, as the advertisers say. The sound of shuffling footsteps could be heard. The door opened and there appeared an ancient dame, so like the traditional witch down to the crouch-headed stick, the stoop, the nose and chin that nearly met, above all, in the malignancy of her expression, that Bobby was almost inclined to expect her to utter some frightful spell destined to change him into a pet dog or a fat black cat. Instead she just snapped:
“We don’t buy anything at the door.”
“I’m so sorry if I’ve disturbed you,” Bobby apologized. “Is Mr. Hands in?”
“Mr. who?” she demanded after a momentary delay which Bobby suspected was due to hesitation whether to answer at all or to slam the door in his face. But that would have been difficult for he had managed to insert, not his foot—for feet are crushable—but himself between door and jamb. So the old lady compromised by saying, still more angrily: “No one’s in but me.”
“Should you mind if I waited a little till somebody did come?” Bobby asked.
“Can’t stop you if you want to,” she admitted reluctantly. “May be he won’t be back all night. Wait as long as you like,” and therewith, taking advantage of an incautious movement Bobby made she slammed the door to, and he heard her retreating footsteps as she shuffled away.
He stood there for a few moments, perpending, deeply conscious of no great yearning for an all-night watch—especially as fog and mist were slowly creeping up from the river. The big black cat came near, sat on its haunches, and said “Miau” loudly, clearly, and scornfully, evidently meaning: “So much for you, beat it.” Bobby, resisting the impulse Kipling s
ays all proper men experience when they see a cat, decided he had better obey the injunction and walked away, ignoring the louder and now triumphant “Miau” that followed him.
It was growing dark now as he walked slowly back between that double row of bungalows run to seed before their time. Yet not so dark but that he was aware as he turned into the main road of two men cycling away with a haste that suggested they had no desire to be seen.
He was fairly sure he had not been followed—or ‘tailed’ to be technical—and it was possibly only fancy that made him suspect those two disappearing cyclists of having been interested in his movements. His thoughts turned to Private Investigator Groan. Had that busy gentleman, Bobby wondered, found in the Jasmine sketch-book of which he had so unluckily—or luckily, from his point of view—obtained possession, something else that had led him hither? Bobby frowned at the thought. Nothing he could object to. Groan had a perfect right to try to recover the lost picture, even though he would have to be very careful how he proceeded. But then Groan was a prudent person, with a very clear idea of just how far he could venture in that odd kind of no man’s land which divides the legal from the illegal and never mind the ethics. And then Monkey Baron and his friends, equally keen on recovering the picture, though what they would do with it if they got it was more doubtful. More probable perhaps that the two cyclists belonged to this latter lot, for Groan, economical by necessity and careful of expenses when there was no client to pay for them, was not likely to employ two when one would do as well, indeed better. Nothing much to be done about it in either case, except to try to arrange for an unobtrusive watch to be kept on the house.
“Not that I expect anything to happen tonight,” he told the Inspector to whom he was talking at the local police station where he had called to collect the car he had left there. “But you never know. There’s an old woman but she says she’s alone in the house. If anyone else is seen or turns up later on, let Central know at once. You’ve had no inquiry about the car left on the road near the Lower Flats?”
“No, sir, not a word.”
“It may be you never will,” Bobby said gloomily.
“Seems queer,” admitted the Inspector. “Can’t say I like the looks of it myself. Those Lower Flats—anything might happen there and nothing ever be known.”
“Got a voter’s list handy?” Bobby asked.
A slightly surprised Inspector produced one. Bobby found no mention there of the old house at the end of Bungalow Row. Either there was no qualified resident or no vote had been claimed. Not very interesting. The Inspector was looking at him questioningly.
“It’s this Rembrandt picture case, isn’t it?” the Inspector asked. “I saw it once. Nothing much to look at, but it did catch the eye somehow. Famous, I suppose.”
“Very much so,” Bobby agreed. “It’s the risk of its being destroyed that worries me. We’ve got to be careful and yet we can’t put recovering it first, for there are three men’s lives involved—an art expert’s, an artist’s, and a picture-lover’s.”
“A picture-lover’s?” the Inspector repeated doubtfully.
“When a man’s in love,” Bobby told him, “just simply anything may happen.”
“Yes, sir,” agreed the Inspector, and afterwards, when Bobby had driven away, said to his Sergeant: “First time I’ve heard there was a woman mixed up in this business.”
“There always is,” said the Sergeant darkly. “Can’t keep ’em out of anything these days.”
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE S.B.G. AT NIGHT
BACK AT HOME at last, Bobby indulged in a hot bath, enjoyed the meal waiting for him, settled down with Olive, coffee, and a cigarette, to enjoy that fascinating new toy of theirs—their television set whereon tiny dancing figures were beginning to trace those patterns Bobby always declared he found equally provocative of slumber and of contemplation.
Then the phone rang.
“That—that thing,” Olive said from the depths of her heart, for indeed she loathed the instrument beyond expression, regarding it as the hydrogen bomb of domestic repose. Bobby picked up the receiver. Olive went off to put the kettle on, since she knew the signs and knew coffee and sandwiches were sure to be required. Bobby soon followed her. Olive said bitterly:
“Got to go out, I suppose, and won’t be back till goodness knows when. And I do hope not looking like a mashed turnip.”
“I never look like mashed turnip,” Bobby protested indignantly.
“You did last time,” Olive reminded him.
“Exceptional,” Bobby said. “And don’t worry. It’s not likely to be anything much. Somebody seen climbing in an S.B.G. ground-floor window. Central thinks it may have something to do with the lost Rembrandt and want me to go along. Probably some crook heard of paintings there worth big money and thinks he’ll cash in on one or get a big reward for returning it. Oh, all right, if the coffee’s ready I may as well take it along but you shouldn’t have troubled. They’re sending a car—sounds like it now.”
“I’m going to bed,” said Olive, “and don’t you dare wake me when you do get in.”
“Promise,” said Bobby, knowing perfectly well that however late—or early—his return, Olive would at once wake up, even though pretending otherwise.
A police car had in fact arrived and now conveyed him with all proper speed through the unobstructed nocturnal streets to the S.B.G. There, when the car drew up, Sergeant Ford at once emerged from the dark belt of shadow cast by that heavy, gloomy old building. He greeted Bobby with the announcement:
“It’s Sir Walter Welton, sir.”
“What is?” asked Bobby.
“Man seen entering,” Ford explained. “Sir Walter Welton. The Director.”
“Nonsense,” said Bobby.
“Yes, sir.” Ford agreed like the good little subordinate he was. “Only it is. There’s his car,” and Ford swung the ray from his electric lamp to show a car parked near.
“Stolen,” Bobby suggested.
“Identified,” Ford told him, “by one of our chaps who knows him from having been on this beat. He saw the man climbing in on the east side. Rang up and was told to take no action till help came, so as to be sure of holding the bloke in case a getaway had been fixed up. Next thing he saw a light showing, so he climbed up himself to have a look and there was Sir Walter Welton. No possible mistake, he says. Either Sir Walter or his ghost. And what’s he doing there at this time of night, climbing in at a window of his own show?”
“Well, we’ll go and ask him,” Bobby said.
“It’s screwy,” pronounced Ford. “Same as all the rest of this screwy case.”
Hurriedly Bobby made sure that the building was so surrounded that no one could possibly leave it unobserved; and then with two attending constables followed Ford to the opened window by which the intruder—Sir Walter, as Bobby still refused to believe, or another—had made his forcible entry. It was Monkey Baron whose name was in Bobby’s mind, for Monkey was still capable of what was in effect a fairly easy climb, even if the more spectacular feats of his youth were now beyond his powers.
Reaching the window Bobby wriggled his way through, taking note of the fact as he did so that the narrowness of an aperture he had had to enlarge to permit the passage of his own body, could hardly have been enough for the broad-shouldered Sir Walter to get through. Once inside he dropped softly to the floor. Ford and the two constables followed. They were now in a small room, used generally for the showing of pictures considered to be of minor interest and probably on their way to the basement storage cellars. From it, there was access to the great sculpture hall directly under the central cupola. Towards this they made their way, treading softly through the huge and empty silences of these vast corridors and galleries.
Bobby led the way. Behind him came the others, looking doubtfully around, uneasily indeed, as they came to this great and famous hall where statues glimmered palely in the gloom, leaping to sudden life when the searching ray from Ford’s la
mp fell upon them and then disappearing again into the prevailing darkness as the lamp’s rays swept on.
“They might all be watching,” the first constable said below his breath, whispered indeed.
“Something moved—there,” his companion murmured, and he pointed towards one marble figure to which the alternating shades of light and shadow had seemed to give a semblance of movement.
“Rats,” Ford muttered uneasily. “Near the river.”
Bobby hushed them into silence. He stood listening intently for he, too, thought he had heard something. But the constable who had spoken first still watched that statue doubtfully, against his common-sense more than half expecting to see it descend from its pedestal and move towards them. A faint rustling became audible, hardly that, more a movement in the air than anything else, and from which direction it came none of them could tell for sound was not easily located in that great building, so full of the whispering wind and faint and distant echoes. But the questing rays from lamp and torch showed nothing save the statues still upon their pedestals and groups of figures frozen in their marble immobility.
Bobby beckoned to the two constables to follow him. To Ford he whispered to wait, sheltering behind the great group that has come down to us from antiquity of Ulysses straining against his bonds above two rowers pulling stolidly at their oars. It was not a suggestion Ford relished over much, for so lifelike was that straining, yearning figure, it seemed as if it might break loose at any moment.
Triple Quest: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 23