Bones in the Barrow

by Josephine Bell

  Chief-Inspector Johnson, however, had none of David’s scruples. Terry Byrnes was summoned, and shown a series of cabinet portraits. In these a number of glamorous, dark-haired, intense-looking heads reared themselves on necks encircled by pearls, while lightly draped shoulders faded into the bottom of the picture. Terry chose the right one, feeling confident for the first time since his original visit to the Yard. When he had gone Johnson picked up David’s list of the missing woman’s friends. The inspector had no scruples about anyone’s feelings. He wanted to make his case.

  But progress was slow. Mrs. Hilton had been careful not to compromise herself with her Boxwood friends, who turned out to be little more than acquaintances, though they had followed the modern habit of calling by the Christian name anyone whom they met for a second time. Nor did the average female intelligence of the villa world of Boxwood reach a high standard. Chief-Inspector Johnson was met with stupid coldness, stupid anger, avid but stupid curiosity, senseless malice, silly though loyal affection for Felicity; after many hours listening to inconsequent ramblings and false conclusions he began to take an exceedingly dim view of the womanhood of the district. Until at last he called at the home of Mrs. Basil Sims.

  Mrs. Sims told him quite frankly that she detested Felicity Hilton and for the best of reasons.

  “My husband pets her,” she said. “Oh, I don’t mean literally. Basil is much too lazy ever to get mixed up in an affair. But he always talks to her as if she needed looking after, and she laps it up with those great cow eyes of hers, and you can almost hear her purr.”

  She laughed aloud as she contemplated the picture of the cow-puss purring its horns off, and even Chief-Inspector Johnson smiled. “So, even though I know Basil doesn’t care twopence for anyone except me, I am wildly jealous. And I’ve been so thankful to know she was still away, and Basil hasn’t mentioned her name for months except—”

  She broke off suddenly, remembering something.

  “Go on,” said Johnson. “What did he say, and when?”

  “I can’t remember when, said Mrs. Sims. “But not very long ago; perhaps a month or six weeks. Basil told me he thought Alastair was going nuts as a result of living alone. I asked him what he meant. Alastair and he always go up on the business train together in the same carriage, and he’d been asking about Felicity as a matter of common politeness. ‘You needn’t make an excuse for your asking,’ I said. ‘We all know what a fatherly interest you take in Felicity.’ Basil doesn’t mind being teased about her a bit, which is always a good sign, don’t you think, Inspector? So then I asked what happened, and he said Alastair merely repeated what he’s said all along about her being with an ill friend. So then Basil said in a joking way, ‘You haven’t done away with her, I suppose?’ or something like that. And it was his answer that rather upset Basil, so that he wanted to tell me about it. He said he felt distinctly odd when Alastair smiled in a peculiar manner and said, perfectly seriously, ‘That would not be at all an easy thing to do.’ ”

  Mrs. Sims stopped abruptly, driven now by her imagination into a dark lane of horror.

  “You don’t think—” she said faintly. “I mean, if he’s mad, he couldn’t have—”

  Chief-Inspector Johnson took his leave firmly, and without answering these half formulated questions. He was in a hurry to find Mr. Basil Sims. And to find him before he went home that day to hear what his wife had to tell him. Though she might telephone, of course. There was always that possibility.

  Mrs. Sims had not telephoned to her husband’s office. Johnson, after asking the receptionist if a message had been received from Mrs. Sims, was told, no, there had been no call from Boxwood.

  “In that case,” said the inspector, “I will deliver it in person.”

  Mr. Sims was affable, though clearly mystified. Any annoyance he may have felt on learning of Johnson’s ruse to enter his office was admirably controlled. The inspector gave his usual guarded account of his search for Mrs. Hilton, and carefully led Basil to give his own views. To his surprise the latter said he was not a bit anxious about her. He did not describe the rather sinister conversation his wife said he had held with Hilton. Instead he explained his view that Felicity Hilton was the sort of woman who would always find someone to look after her. Alastair was so darned dull, he continued, a thoroughgoing good chap, but too dim for a woman like Felicity. And after all, she’d consoled herself before, so why not now?

  “I take it you knew the lady pretty well?” said Johnson carefully. “More intimately than your wife, I mean to say?”

  “Now, now,” said Sims, “don’t take me up wrong. I’m a good boy, I am.”

  “But Mrs. Hilton—er—confided in you?”

  “Perhaps she did. Now and then. She’s the sort of girl you can’t help wanting to—well, protect—if you know what I mean?”

  “But your protection did not go very far?”

  “You should see my wife,” said Sims, very earnestly. “God help me if anything ever went too far.”

  There was a short silence. Then the chief-inspector said, quite casually, “Has it ever occurred to you that Mr. Hilton, in a fit of—misplaced jealousy, shall we say—might have taken any drastic steps against Mrs. Hilton?”

  “What d’ you mean? Divorce?”

  “No. I meant more in the nature of physical violence.”

  “Not on your life! He’s absolutely crazy about her.”

  “That has been a motive in a great many—er—tragedies.”

  “You aren’t seriously suggesting that he’s done away with her?”

  “No. But I am seriously suggesting that she may have been done away with. For reasons of jealousy, or fear, or simply gain. By someone who knew her intimately. You have not, I take it, done away with her yourself?”

  “That,” said Basil Sims, surprisingly, showing all his excellent teeth in a wide smile, “would not be at all an easy thing to do.”

  III

  “I need your co-operation,” David Wintringham told his wife.

  “Oh, yes, darling. How?”

  “This Hilton case. We’ve got to find the man Peter.”

  “Can’t you advertise? In the agony column. ‘Peter can learn something to his advantage—’ ”

  “It would hardly be to his advantage to find himself at Scotland Yard, held for questioning.”

  “It wouldn’t matter if he was innocent. Steve Mitchell thinks he was just a stooge, if he exists at all. Steve thinks Mrs. Hilton was simply playing him off against her husband, so as to make a better bargain over her return home. She was an old hand at this temporary elopement racket, wasn’t she?”

  “I think she had no idea how thoroughly viciously she was behaving.”

  “Darling, don’t make excuses for her. I can’t bear it. I loathe the bind-weed type of woman. Tell me how I can help you.”

  David explained that Hilton knew very little of his wife’s expeditions to London except that she left home early in the morning, dressed in her best, and that she usually seemed to spend her time in or near the British Museum.

  “Not really the sort of place one normally dresses up for,” said Jill. “But perhaps she used to meet her Peter there.”

  “We don’t know. What we do know is that she went to a certain health shop in the neighbourhood, where she bought small packets of dried herbs and other concoctions she believed were good for her rheumatism. I have also found out that she went in for crafts in a mild way, again with the idea of keeping her joints supple. Quite sound, and rather pathetic, when you look at the state of the finger-joints. The craft shop where she got her supplies is also near the B.M.”

  “Where do I come in?” repeated Jill, patiently.

  “You go into these shops to browse around and perhaps buy one or two things. You have been recommended by your friend, Mrs. Hilton. If I begin asking for her they will suspect me, or my intentions, which comes to the same thing. There is no one so respectable as the mild eccentric who owns a health store.”
/>   “You’ll have to tell me lots more about her or I shall simply make an ass of myself.”

  “I’ll be at your elbow. If you break the ice, I’ll come in appropriately.”

  “I don’t expect they’ll know who I mean from Adam.”

  But Jill was wrong. Mrs. Hilton was known at both shops by name, and in both cases the assistants were eager to know why she had not visited them for so many months. They hoped her arthritis was not crippling her.

  “She has been away,” said David, cutting into the conversation.

  This remark brought no further response in either case. At the health shop, which they visited second, Jill said, following the prearranged plan, as she received her change, “There is a tea shop near here that Mrs. Hilton is rather attached to. She told me to be sure to go there. But I’ve stupidly forgotten to bring the slip of paper she wrote down its name on, and I didn’t bother to learn it because I had it written down. You wouldn’t know it, I suppose? There must be masses of tea shops about here and in New Oxford Street.”

  “It wasn’t in New Oxford Street,” said a second assistant, who was listening. “I remember her saying this place made better scones than she got anywhere except when she made them at home. That was when she was using our herbal tea. A turning off Russell Street I think she said, and it had a funny name, like Tea Cosy, or something.”

  “I expect we’ll find it,” said Jill.

  The Wintringhams had to turn many corners, however, before they came upon the place they sought, and then they were uncertain, for the name was Cosy Corner, and they had passed a rival on the other side of Bloomsbury Street called the Tea Caddy. Nevertheless they went in and sat down.

  “This is where you come into your own,” said David. “I leave it all to you.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” Jill asked. “It’s no good leaving it all to me when I haven’t a clue about any of it.”

  “Find out if this is the dive Mrs. Hilton raved over, and if the boy friend came here with her, and if so, what he was like.”

  Jill gulped, but a brisk young waitress arriving at that moment prevented her from expressing her feelings. And the girl was so agreeable, and so obliging, that she found it quite easy to invent a recommendation from Mrs. Hilton as her reason for being there. The girl knew Mrs. Hilton by name; everyone there knew her by name, she explained. She had been a very regular customer during the whole of the previous summer and autumn.

  “But we haven’t seen her since last Christmas,” said the waitress bringing a second, quite unwanted, bowl of sugar to their table.

  “She has been away,” said Jill carelessly.

  “Away from London, do you mean?” said the girl. “Or away from home? She never seems to stay put, does she? Always on the move.”

  Jill smiled, and David pressed her foot under the table, as a warning, or an encouragement; she wondered which.

  “I mean to say,” went on the waitress, encouraged by Jill’s expression, “three flats in six months is going it a bit, I should say. I wonder she managed to find them.”

  “I know,” said Jill. “Poor things, they didn’t seem to have any luck with their housing.”

  The waitress, recalled to herself by a fierce glance from the pay-desk, hurried off to some patient newcomers, and David and Jill looked at each other.

  “Without rousing her suspicions,” said David, “we’ve got to discover if she knows where those digs were.”

  “Mrs. Hilton isn’t likely to have told her, or not the truth, anyway. Didn’t you say her husband knew she had a pet tea shop in these parts?”

  “Yes. Actually, I don’t think he ever bothered to look for it. But I agree she wouldn’t be so careless, after all the trouble she went to in other ways, to cover her tracks.”

  When the waitress came to their table again Jill said, “It’s funny you should mention three flats where Mrs. Hilton lived last year. Because I’ve been thinking back, and I can only remember two.”

  She paused, then took the plunge. “Boxwood, at first.”

  “That was when she first began coming here,” said the girl. “Right at the start she was different to most customers. There are some read a book all the time, never say a word, don’t even condescend to look up when they order; you mightn’t exist. Then there’s some talk about the weather or what’s in the paper. But she was really friendly, except when he was there, of course.”

  “You mean Peter?” said David, coming into the conversation too suddenly.

  “I mean her husband,” said the waitress coldly. She was startled, and felt she had said too much. She gathered up her tray and left them.

  “That’s torn it,” said Jill. “You might have kept out. First you leave the spadework to me, then you jump in and ruin it, just when I’m getting somewhere. I don’t see how we can possibly say another word about Mrs. H.”

  “I wonder if she meant Peter or Alastair,” said David, sighing deeply.

  “Peter or—oh, I see. Yes. You’d better ask her yourself. I give up.”

  But the waitress had given up, too. Her tables were full, and fresh people were coming in all the time, to stand helplessly looking for empty seats. She slapped their bill down on their table without a word as she passed them, and they felt that it was time to go.

  “Cheer up,” said David, when they reached the street. “Given a tactful approach I think she’ll talk. She’ll have to talk. There are two important things she can tell us.”

  “The man who sometimes came with her, and the second and third places they had so-called flats in.”

  “Quite. With that information we ought to find the elusive and many-sided Peter. Or, at least, Steve’s posse ought to.”

  But, though Superintendent Mitchell was graciously pleased to accept their news, Chief-Inspector Johnson, in his subsequent inquiries, achieved only a moderate success at the Cosy Corner. Alarmed to think that anything could have happened to one of her pet customers, the waitress was quite willing to tell all she knew. But it did not amount to very much. Mrs. Hilton had certainly chatted more than most customers do, but all the inspector discovered was that she had lived at Boxwood, then at or near Golders Green, and finally somewhere in the neighbourhood of Battersea Park. The exact address was still unknown. And again, Mrs. Hilton sometimes had a man with her on her visits to the tea shop, a man whom the waitress imagined to be her husband, and who was addressed by Mrs. Hilton as Peter. But the description of this individual was anything but clear.

  “Might be almost anyone,” said David, when he had heard it, “not a giant or a dwarf or an inhabitant of other continents. Average height and build, neither young nor old, nor, it would seem, middle-aged. Difficult.”

  “Girls of twenty have a different idea of middle age to what we do,” said Johnson.

  “Too true. She meant he wasn’t what she’d call a boy, but he had probably kept his figure, as they say. Let’s look at the rest of it. Brown hair, doesn’t remember noticing the eyes, clean-shaved, dark suit, and so on. Might be anyone, as I said before.”

  “It might be Hilton himself,” said Chief-Inspector Johnson. “Incidentally, it fits Mrs. Hunt’s description of Rust.”

  “Did Felicity ever call Hilton, Peter? That could be most confusing.”

  “We have only his word for it that she didn’t.”

  “What about the housekeeper?”

  “Nix. Can’t remember her calling him anything but dear. He called her ‘darling.’ ”

  “Poor devil. Somehow I can’t help being on Alastair’s side in this, Johnson. And the Lapthorn woman? What does she say?”

  “She swears Peter was real.”

  “After all, there’s no reason why there shouldn’t be a Peter. In fact, we have more reason than not to believe that there was. Unless Mrs. Hilton was more peculiar than we have allowed for.”

  “Yes, I expcet there really was a Peter. That’s the devil of it.”

  “Have you ever asked yourself this? Why doesn’t he come forwar
d? Suppose Alastair did murder his wife out of jealousy, because she had gone to live with this man. Then Peter would lose her. She would disappear, suddenly, hideously, without a word or a sign. She would be missed from wherever they were living. In one of these flats.”

  “Is it possible that the affair had already come to an end? Mrs. Mason’s evidence suggests it. My theory is that she left this Peter, or he cleared out, and left her. Hilton discovered where she was, while she was still making up her mind to go home, and he murdered her, and began to dispose of her body. The money arrangements fit that theory. Hilton never stopped her allowance, and it was being drawn under her signature right up to February. I think he drew it himself. It was his own money, even if he forged her signature to get it back.”

  “No,” said David. “No, you can’t get away with that. Not if Harold Rust was Hilton. Because Rust spent his nights in Waterbury Street, and Hilton at Boxwood.”

  “How do we know that? Hilton had his car out in the evenings a great deal last November and early December.”

  “Surely neighbours would have noticed if he’d been away night after night, coming in early in the morning?”

  “Possibly. But they aren’t always observant. His immediate neighbours have no comments to offer either way, except that he went out a lot in the evenings after the days got shorter. That’s all they recollect. Then there’s another thing. Harold Rust, the cat’s-meat man, had no proper luggage.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “One small suitcase, hardly more than a large attaché case, and one pair of pyjamas, one spare shirt, and two pairs of socks. No other clothes except what he stood up in. Mrs. Hunt used to wash out the pyjamas and shirts every week and iron and air them the same day. Same with the socks, only oftener. Charging a good price for doing it, of course.”

  “No luggage,” said David, thoughtfully. “That is quite a point.” He was silent for a few seconds. Then he went on, in his old argumentative voice, “But you’ll have to find Peter in the end, won’t you? This mysterious Peter, who nobody knows.”